Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America

Abstract

Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. x, 216. Index. Cloth, $42.00; paper, $16.00.) Even U. B. Phillips, who could be positively obtuse when it came to slave culture, understood the importance of the biblical saga of to the black community. But only Eddie S. Glaude Jr., former student of Albeit Raboteau and Cornel West, has thought the subject worthy of an entire monograph. He was right; the result is an eloquent and thoughtful explication of the ways in which the ancient tale provided the African-- American community-South and North-with metaphorical framework for understanding their enslavement and their flight into freedom. Black Americans recognized themselves in the story, and as they began to forge independent African congregations in the wake of the American Revolution, they situated their religious and political struggles within the sacred narrative, which gave their demands divine sanction. Some of what Glaude presents here will be familiar to readers of this journal, yet his insights into the topic are consistently fresh and original. He argues, as has John B. Boles, that black dreams of liberation were expressed as verbal reenactments of the Israelites' flight from Egypt. In the slave quarters, rhetorical comparisons to the legend of Moses kept hope alive that God would deliver his chosen people once again, especially if they behaved according to his will. Jews in Babylon were held against their will, Glaude quotes Daniel Coker as preaching to his Bethel Church congregation in Philadelphia. So were our brethren (29). Coker's somewhat confused metaphor (which in fact referred to the Book of Ezra) nonetheless helped former bondpeople in the Pennsylvania region to collapse the past into the present in way that allowed them to imagine brighter future. The God of the righteous promised African Americans freedom even in the land of the new pharaoh. Racist street action, such as New York City's July Days riots of 1834, provide case in point for Glaude's analysis. As the promise of the revolutionary era collapsed into white mob activity directed against black churches and integrated patriotic celebrations, black ministers returned to the lessons of Exodus. Rhetorical reminders of God's covenant, the trials in Egypt, and the struggles in the wilderness as prelude to the promised land became commonplace in northern oratory as the black community sought to make sense out of the habitual violence visited upon their homes, their businesses, and their bodies. The subsequent movement that Glaude dubs Exodus politics was a form of common complaint against oppression, faith in eventual deliverance, and the belief that democracy and justice in America ultimately rested with the nation's darker sons and daughters (111). …