Mission, Migration, and Contested Authority

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the history of Protestantism in Haiti and the formation of the AME Church’s missionary station in Port-au-Prince at the end of the nineteenth century. Beginning with the Haitian emigration movement of the 1820s, the chapter shows how the AME Church’s relationship to Haiti changed over time. As other scholars have discussed, African Americans’ participation in the United States’ missionary impulse at the end of the nineteenth century was both distinct from and like that of the United States’ white majority. Black church leaders distinguished themselves from whites in that they proudly used both Christian theology and foreign missions to fight for Black liberation at home and abroad. However, like white Americans, most African American clergy also believed in Protestant Christian supremacy. Consequently, AME leaders’ demands for the “racial uplift” of Black people across the world advanced the colonial project inherent in white Americans’ Christian missionary enterprise. With this African American perspective in mind, this chapter also shows that AME missionaries in Haiti had to interact with various people groups with whom they forged ecumenical ties. Such ties suggest that a distinct story might be told if events that occurred in Haiti formed the center of analysis.