Race, Place, and Religion: African American Missionaries in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a more complete analysis of the various conceptions of race and identity held by African American missionaries working in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While some attention has been paid to African American missionaries working in Africa at this time, little has been written about how their different theological beliefs impacted their conceptions of race and identity as it relates to the local African populations they encountered. It can be determined that there were distinct links between the different theological beliefs held by African American missionaries working in Africa at this time and their conceptions of race. For example, evangelical African American missionaries more often associated themselves with a Pan-African identity than non-evangelical ones. Alongside this, their theological understandings of the Back-to-Africa Movement were quite different depending on where they worked in Africa and it impacted how they viewed themselves in association with the local African populations they encountered. Finally, different conceptions of race and identity manifested themselves along eschatological lines. Although these missionaries’ conceptions of race have already been analyzed, the connection to their theological beliefs and how it influenced their conceptions of race is relatively unexplored.