Abstract
On 17 June 2015 a white supremacist invaded Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire on a Bible study group. Nine members were killed, including the pastor, Clementa Pinckney. Pinckney had been a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and of the State Senate, as well as an AME minister, and the eulogy at his funeral was given by President Barack Obama. The story of the Charleston atrocity and its aftermath says much about the history of the AME, the largest of the black Methodist denominations, capturing its courageous and risky witness against injustice, its role in giving institutional expression to black aspirations, and its success in claiming a recognized place in the polity and public life of the United States. These themes, and more besides, are explored in Dennis Dickerson's magisterial history of the denomination.Professor Dickerson is well qualified to write the history of the AME Church. As the substantial bibliography to the present volume shows, he has been publishing on related subjects for more than two decades, and he has amassed an extensive knowledge of the primary and secondary sources. Here he presents a chronological account, beginning with the development of African Methodism in North America and the Caribbean, and describing the origins of the AME in the work of Richard Allen (1760–1831). Allen's departure from St George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1787 rooted the AME in an Exodus narrative that continued to be significant as a new denomination gradually took shape. Formally constituted in 1816, with Allen as its first bishop, the AME grew steadily through the nineteenth century, seeing itself as ‘a Creole church for the Atlantic world’ (106).Dickerson shows how building the infrastructure of the denomination, including flagship institutions like Wilberforce University in Ohio, could sometimes sit uncomfortably with the AME's ‘insurgent’ emphases, with commentators like Frederick Douglass criticizing the AME leadership, albeit unfairly, for failing to prioritize the cause of abolition. During the era of Reconstruction the AME grew rapidly in the southern states of the United States; thereafter, economic pressures and the impact of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation led to a massive migration to the industrial and urban north in the decades around World War I. Both developments posed challenges and opportunities for the denomination in ministering to new populations and addressing deep human needs. The narrative here weaves together the broad themes of political, social, and ecclesiastical history with case studies of individuals like Winfield H. Mixon, of Alabama, Bishop Henry M. Turner, the Social Gospellers Reverdy and Emma Ransom, and the Garveyite R. H. Tobitt. The final chapters discuss the civil rights years and the AME's sense of being a global church by the closing decades of the twentieth century.The tension between institution and insurgency surfaces in each chapter: over abolitionism before the Civil War and Tuskegee-style strategies in the ‘Jim Crow’ era; over responses to Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and proto-apartheid in South Africa; over civil rights and equal rights. But other themes emerge: pressure for indigenous rather than African American leadership in AME churches in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America; challenges to episcopal autocracy and occasional abuses of power; the call to recognize and fully affirm the ministry and leadership of women. Dickerson acknowledges that ‘respectable’ AME congregations sometimes proved less than welcoming to southern migrants and African musical traditions, and that the AME lost ground to Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal denominations at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, although he records the success of AME megachurches like Allen Cathedral in Jamaica, New York. He also notes that the United Methodist Church had a far better record of appointing black women bishops than the AME, although twenty-first-century General Conferences worked hard to redress this situation.Threaded through this history is an insistence that those nurtured in the AME Church remembered their heritage, and that the denomination continued to draw on its African and Methodist origins. AME heritage mattered to Shirley Graham Du Bois and to Dave Chappelle, and the AME retains its place within the structures of World Methodism. How the Wesleys' Methodism and its later expressions are inflected in a worldwide denomination that is nonetheless predominantly African American in membership and ethos remains a fascinating phenomenon.Grateful thanks are due to Dennis Dickerson for this thoroughly researched and beautifully written study of one of World Methodism's most significant branches.
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