“Welcome to the Ransomed”

Less than a week after the carnage at Shiloh, Congress voted to free enslaved people and to compensate slaveowners in Washington, DC. Daniel A. Payne, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, visited President Lincoln and encouraged him to sign the bill, which he did on April 16, 1862. That same week, Payne preached his most influential sermon, Welcome to the Ransomed, or, Duties of the Colored Inhabitants of the District of Columbia. Lincoln impressed Payne as a man of “real greatness.” High praise for Lincoln would be in short supply, especially from African Americans. Lincoln had wavered on emancipation, many believed, and he needed to pursue a harder war focused on abolishing slavery. The war grew in intensity, and so did debates over slavery’s role in the conflict. Through this phase of the war, Americans turned to scripture to defend an even more brutal war for and against emancipation.

The Charleston Massacre

This chapter talks about Dylann Storm Roof, a white supremacist, who brutally murdered nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015. It discusses Roof's actions that renewed debates over guns, the Second Amendment, and the right to bear arms. The Charleston massacre changed the dynamics of American debate over symbols of the Confederacy, including the Confederate battle flag and monuments to Confederate leaders such as Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. This chapter also looks at events prior to Roof committing the murders, in which he toured South Carolina historical sites with links to the Civil War and slavery, posting photographs and selfies of his visits. Roof's online website, which was infested with attacks on African Americans, Hispanics, and Jews, described the story of his racist radicalization.

Epilogue

On June 27, 2015, ten days after the massacre at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Claudia Rankine published an essay on black loss in the New York Times’ Sunday magazine: “the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering,” Rankine writes; yet “[w]e live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here.”...

Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s

This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.