The Community Became an Almost Civilized and Christian One: John Stewart's Mission to the Wyandots and Religious Colonialism as African American Racial Uplift

Abstract

ON SATURDAY MORNING JULY 5, 1911, the Reverend Dr. Edward L. Gilliam, an African American Methodist Episcopal pastor from Columbus, Ohio, led a group of black men, women, and children on a pilgrimage north to Upper Sandusky, Ohio. They went to pay homage to the Reverend John Stewart, who, according to church legend, founded the Methodist Episcopal Home Missionary Movement there a century before. As the pilgrims remembered the story, Reverend Stewart earned his saintly reputation for accomplishing what others had failed to do before him—he was the first to convert a previously “unconvertible” Wyandot community and laid the groundwork for the very first permanent mission of the American Methodist Episcopal Home Missionary Society. For the African American pilgrims for whom antiblack prejudice was a normal part of life in 1911, that Stewart was also African American was even more cause for celebration. To them, Reverend Stewart was a model black citizen and a shining example of the potential benefits of racial uplift ideology—a philosophy and set of tactics to lift African Americans economically, socially, and culturally into fuller U.S. citizenship. African Americans who espoused the tenets of racial uplift ideology advocated for Stewart’s enshrinement in the ever-growing pantheon of successful black professors, ministers, journalists, orators, and writers whose lives, they believed, were the evidence of racial progress and the best arguments for African Americans to be included in full American citizenship. Stewart was not only a model cleric and citizen according to black uplift leaders, but he also moved outside the world of black and white. Stewart went beyond uplifting the African Americans by extending his work to a Native American community. This showed black peoples’ worth not only within their own communities but also within the greater United States. To the pilgrims, Stewart was also a black agent, an apostle of American civilization. This article argues that in addition to striving toward middle-class respectability and economic independence, turn-of-thetwentieth-century black progressives put forth African American religious colonialism among Native Americans as evidence that black