Race Patriotism: Protest and Print Culture in the AME Church

Abstract

E. Franklin Frazier identified the African American Church as a “nation within a nation,” and now Julius H. Bailey explores what professions of allegiance to such a body entail, mostly confining his discussion to the nineteenth-century African Methodist Episcopal (ame) Church (E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America, 1964, p. 49). Using an examination of the extensive print culture of the ame Church as his springboard, Bailey proceeds to discuss topics that include the Church's expansion into the western United States, ame Church views of evolution, the controversy over whether to preserve the word African in the denomination's title, and debates over whether African Americans should emigrate to Africa. Unsurprisingly, he uncovers tremendous diversity regarding these topics. The ame Church was no monolith. Bailey gives a full account of competition and conflict between the light-skinned African American minister Daniel Coker and his dark-skinned contemporary Richard Allen, both of whom were elected bishops of the new ame Church in 1817. (Allen accepted the position; Coker, possibly feeling his light-skinned appearance to be a hindrance, declined, and in three years' time emigrated to Liberia.)