Abstract
In 1887, Amanda Berry Smith had a short dialogue with some recently arrived African American women migrants in Cape Palmas, Liberia. A welcome meeting had been planned for the group by resident Americo-Liberians at a local school. “When I heard of it I said I would go,” recalled Smith in her autobiography. “But I was told, a little while after, that no women were to go; it was only for men. Then I was more anxious than ever; and, womanlike, I became suspicious, as well as curious.” Claiming a kind of parity of citizenship, she reasoned to herself: “Why can’t I go? These emigrants are from my country, and I have a right to go, and I will.” Smith reported that the excluded wives groused about their husbands’ opposition and the lack of proper accommodations for them at the meeting. She then countered that she had no husband to obey and could easily bring along her own chair. Smith further mused: “They all knew I was a kind of privileged character anyhow, and generally carried out what I undertook.” Upon her arrival at the meeting, Smith planted her chair “in the middle of the aisle,” symbolizing her excluded status and her protest of it to the assembled. She went on in her narrative to chide the conveners of the welcome meeting, pointing to their “talk enough to have built a tower, if there had been anything in it” as well as their puffed-up assertions about Liberia being a “country where they could be men.”1
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Notes
Claude A. Clegg, III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 6. See also Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black & White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), and Bruce Dorsey, “The Transnational Lives of African American Colonists in Liberia,” in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700 to the Present, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Rusell, and Angela Woollacott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 171–182.
Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: African American Women’s Political History, 1865–1880,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 66–99; Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
A. N. Cadbury, The Life of Amanda Smith: The African Sybil, the Christian Saint (Birmingham, England: Cornish Brothers, 1916); Edith Deen, Great Women of the Christian Faith (New York: Harper, 1959); E. F. Harvey, ed. Amanda Smith: The King’s Daughter (Hampton, TN: Harvey & Tait, 1977); Nancy Hardesty and Adrienne Israel, “Amanda Berry Smith: A ‘Downright Outright Christian,’” in Spirituality and Social Responsibility: Vocational Vision of Women in the United Methodist Tradition, ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), 61–79.
Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998); Beverly Guy Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press,, 1995); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: W. Morrow, 1984); Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Smith is not mentioned in C. S. Smith, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church … from 1856 to 1922 (Philadelphia Book Concern of the AME Church 1922), electronic edition http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/cssmith/smith.html.
Hallie Q. Brown, “Amanda Smith, 1837–1915,” in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, intro. Randall K. Burkett ([1926] New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 128–132.
Adrienne Israel, Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), and Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), chapter 1.
Mia Bay, “The Improbable Ida B. Wells,” Reviews in American History 30 (2002): 439–444.
Stephen Ward Angell, “The Controversy over Women’s Ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church during the 1880s: The Case of Sarah Ann Hughes,” in This Far by Faith: Readings in African American Women’s Religious Biography, ed. Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 94–95.
James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 46.
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “If It Wasn’t for the Women”: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 4, 68. See also Susie C. Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2002), chapter 5, especially 112–128.
Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf 1977), chapter 11; Walter L. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 40; and Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 19–49.
Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Ian Tyrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 101–102.
Eunjin Park, “White” Americans in “Black” Africa: Black and White American Methodist Missionaries in Liberia, 1820–1875 (New York: Routledge, 2001); Sylvia M. Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).
J. R. Oldfield, “The Protestant Episcopal Church, Black Nationalists, and the Expansion of the West African Missionary Field, 1851–1871,” Church History 57 (1988) 1: 31–35. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford, 1989), chapters 8–10.
Sylvia M. Jacobs, “Their’ special Mission’: Afro-American Women as Missionaries to the Congo, 1894–1937,” in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa Ann Streaty Wimberly, “Called to Witness, Called to Serve: African American Methodist Women in Liberian Missions, 1834–1934,” Methodist History 34 (1996) 2: 67–77.
Walter L. Williams, “William Henry Sheppard: Afro-American Missionary in the Congo, 1890–1910,” in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, 135–154.
Ibrahim Sundiatia, Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, 1929–1936 (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), 86.
Rev. Samuel Williams, “Four Years in Liberia: A Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Samuel Williams with Remarks on the Missions, Manners and Customs of the Natives of Western Africa Together with an Answer to Nesbitt’s Book [1857],” in Liberian Dreams: Back to Africa Narratives from the 1850s, ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), 165.
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Rev. William Rankin Dorvee, “The Present Success of Liberia: Its Extent and Meaning,” The African Repository (July 1882): 66.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey, ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 228–240. See also Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 3.
T. McCants Stewart, Liberia: The Americo-African Republic (New York: Edward O. Jenkins’ Sons, 1886), 54.
Edward Wilmot Blyden, “Liberia at the American Centennial,” Methodist Quarterly Review (July 1877): 461.
Dr. E. W. Blyden, “America and Africa’s Evangelization,” African Repository (October 1888): 108.
Hollis R. Lynch, ed. Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), xi–xxxv.
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Classical Black Nationalism from the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York: New York University, 1997), 1–42, and Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, part II.
George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), chapters 3, 7, and 8; Eric T. L. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism and US Imperialism, 1865–1900 chapters 1 and 2. For a treatment that emphasizes the staying power of monogenesis in Christian theology and its power to mitigate racial science, see Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapters 5 and 8.
Albert S. Broussard, African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853–1963 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). On Sheppard, see Williams, Black American and the Evangelization of Africa.
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© 2012 Patricia A. Schechter
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Schechter, P.A. (2012). A Kind of Privileged Character. In: Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012845_2
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