A Higher Mission: The Careers of Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston in Central Africa

Abstract

Black Americans living in the American South in the early twentieth century challenged the discrimination and violence they faced at home, seeking education and coordination of efforts to combat Jim Crow laws and lynchings. Yet some who managed to complete a level of higher education turned their reforming efforts not on the United States but instead toward their ancestral roots in Africa. In A Higher Mission, Kimberly D. Hill introduces us to one such couple: the missionaries Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston. Their careers—at the intersection of colonialism and mission work and classical education and industrial education, spanning the transition from the Congo Free State to the Belgian Congo—provide a fascinating window on the various ways Black missionaries imagined their roles in saving souls and working for social justice. Classically trained Althea Brown (Fisk University) used her education to inform her mission work, even as the couple's denominational sponsor...