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Abstract
This article thinks about the intellectual inheritances bequeathed to Black Studies scholars, and specifically to scholars of African American religions, from Black women Christian educators of the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It focuses on two women: Catherine (Katy) Ferguson (1774-1854), a Presbyterian who started the first Sunday school in New York in 1793, and Emily Christmas Kinch (1879-1932), a missionary in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who founded the Eliza Turner Memorial School in Liberia in 1909, and also became a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s and championed African redemption. It shows how Black women Christian educators developed an “anti-commodified Black Studies,” which in my formulation, refers to grassroots educational institution-building and pedagogical innovation that democratizes the spread and reach of new knowledges for all people.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Naomi Murakawa, J.T. Roane, and Skyler Gordon for offering comments on earlier versions of this article, and to the reviewers, for their generous feedback. I am also grateful to Paul Daniels II for listening to my ramblings about it. This essay is the product of my own thinking aloud about Black Christian women who are so easily overlooked and discarded. I am not entirely sure what we do with these inheritances, but I am grateful for these women and their complex lives which mirror so many of our own.
Notes
1 Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
2 Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy and Society (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), 140.
3 Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution On Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
4 June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” in New Perspectives on Black Studies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 33.
5 Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997).
6 Hortense J. Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date,” Boundary 221, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 72.
7 Imani Perry, “Putting the ‘Public’ in ‘Public Intellectual’,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2010, https://www.chronicle.com/article/putting-the-public-in-public-intellectual/.
8 I am indebted to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman, ed., This Far By Faith; Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ; Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice; and Judith Casselberry, The Labor of Faith, among many other texts in African American women’s religious history. Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Words of Fire, Brittney Cooper’s Beyond Respectability and Mia Bay, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara D. Savage’s Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women have also been helpful in my thinking about Ferguson and Kinch.
9 Judith Weisenfeld, “Invisible Women: On Women and Gender in the Study of African American Religious History,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 1 (2013): 133–49.
10 Ula Y. Taylor, “‘Read[ing] Men and Nations’: Women in the Black Radical Tradition,” Souls 1, no. 4 (September 1, 1999): 73.
11 Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth, 7.
12 Anthea D. Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Judith Casselberry, The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
13 Collier-Thomas, 48.
14 Ibid.
15 New-York Spectator, July 14, 1821; Hampden Federalist and Public Journal, August 1, 1821.
16 Lewis Tappan, “Catherine Ferguson,” American Missionary 8, no. 10 (August 1854): 85–6. Thanks to David W. Wills and Albert Raboteau for this source included in “Where Katy Lived, the Whole Aspect of the Neighborhood Was Changed”: Lewis Tappan’s Obituary for Catherine Ferguson (1854), available at African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project.
17 Tappan, “Catherine Ferguson.”
18 John Michael Giggie, After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 138.
19 Mumia Abu-Jamal and Marc Lamont Hill, The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America (Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 2012).
20 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
21 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).
22 The Christian Times, May 16, 1851.
23 The New York Times, July 13, 1854.
24 Christian Register, July 29, 1854; New-York Recorder, August 2, 1854.
25 The New-York Observer, April 13, 1854. For the original source, please see Favell Lee Mortimer, Far Off; Or, Africa and America Described (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1854), 155–7.
26 New-York Recorder, August 2, 1854.
27 For more on “the confluence of Christian missionary religion and Black settler colonialism,” please see Sylvester A Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 159–270.
28 Baltimore Afro-American, July 10, 1915.
29 Mrs. John W. Olcott, “Recollections of the First Sunday School in New York City,” Southern Workman 52, no. 9 (September 1923): 463.
30 See James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Lawrence S. Little, Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000).
31 Imani Perry, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 7–8.
32 Katherine D. Tillman, Quotations from Negro Authors (Library of Congress, December 31, 1921), 9.
33 Darlene Clark Hine, “‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: The Philanthropic Work of Black Women,” in Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 109–28.
34 Emily Christmas Kinch, West Africa: An Open Door (Philadelphia: The AME Book Concern, 1917), 12.
35 Kinch, West Africa, 13.
36 Ibid.
37 Kinch, West Africa, 23.
38 Ibid., 34.
39 Ibid., 35.
40 Ibid.
41 Emily Christmas Kinch, “Speech Delivered in Liberty Hall,” in Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement, ed. Randall K. Burkett (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 47–8.
42 Randall K. Burkett, ed., Black Redemption: Churchmen Speak for the Garvey Movement (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press Philadelphia, 1978), 43–9; Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 112, 150.
43 Kinch, “Speech Delivered in Liberty Hall,” 47; see also Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 154–200.
44 Ibid., 48–9.
45 Ibid., 48.
46 Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 5.
47 Julius H. Bailey, Race Patriotism: Protest and Print Culture in the AME Church (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 104–31.
48 Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion, 112, 150.
49 Kinch, “Speech Delivered in Liberty Hall,” 49.
50 Edward E. Curtis IV and Sylvester A. Johnson, “The Transnational and Diasporic Future of African American Religions in the United States,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, no. 2 (June 2019): 335.
51 Kinch, “Speech Delivered in Liberty Hall,” 48.
52 Marcus Garvey, “Address to the Second UNIA Convention,” (1921) in Call and Response: Key Debates in African American Studies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Jennifer Burton (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), 278–82.
53 Blain, Set the World on Fire, 88; Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 16–50.
54 The Pittsburgh Courier, August 13, 1932.
55 New Journal and Guide, May 13, 1932.
56 Dianne M. Stewart Diakité and Tracey E. Hucks, “Africana Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 1 (2013): 28–77; Robin D.G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1045–77; Robin D.G. Kelley, “How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 123–47.
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Ahmad Greene-Hayes
Ahmad Greene-Hayes is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Departments of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University.