NOTES:
The citation and publication of material from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign missions archive is by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The citation and publication of material from the archives of the Savery Library is by permission of Talladega College.

ABBREVIATIONS:

ABCFM American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
AMA American Missionary Association
HCM Henry Curtis McDowell
UNIA Universal Negro Improvement Association

1. Research for this paper was made possible by generous assistance from the History Department, Iowa State University, Iowa State University Research Grant Number 701-17-21-95-0011, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and the program in Black Women in Church in Society, the Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta, Georgia.

I presented this paper in different versions at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University and the University of Texas. Many thanks to Denise Spellberg and Toyin Falola, who arranged my visit to the University of Texas. I also appreciate the generous comments and suggestions from Adrian Bennett, Lelia De Andrade, Jill Kern, Gary Tartakov, and Claire Strom. I greatly appreciate the anonymous reviewer's generous suggestions. All mistakes are mine.

2. H.C. McDowell, circular, 7 February 1930, ABCFM archive, ABC 39:2, p. 2, Houghton Library, Harvard University. For the Mbundu translation, Bessie F. McDowell, "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing/ Amanu Petuki," HCM/Ang.4/1/1, Savery Library, Talladega College. See also Charles Johnson, "An Ever-Lifting Song of Black America," New York Times, 14 February 1999, Arts Section, p. 1, p. 34.

3. The term "mission discourse" comes from V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 44-47.

4. I use the term "essential" here on purpose, for this is how many African Americans of the late nineteenth century understood their relationship to Africans. The tensions arising from this perspective are discussed below.

5. H.C. McDowell to National Convention of Congregational Workers Among Colored People, 12 July 1920, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, v. 23, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

6. This practice was followed in the home mission movement as well. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 105.

7. This preference implicitly reinforced a tendency in African American writing about the diaspora which made Africa a touchstone for black masculinity. Kevin Gaines, Uplifiting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 107.

8. "Good News for Africa," Missionary Herald, (November 1918): 492.

9. The Congregationalists expected McDowell to be an exemplar. When the ABCFM sent letters of reference for McDowell, the referees were informed: "Mr. McDowell is being considered as a pioneer missionary with reference to a plan to establish new work in W. Africa representing the Colored Cong. Churches of America. As the responsibilities will be unusually exacting your opinion is especially asked as to his fitness for this movement." "Application for H.C. McDowell," Reference from J.M.P. Metcalf, ABCFM archive, ABC 6, v. 140, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The foreign secretary of the ABCFM reminded McDowell that he was considered the figurehead of the African American Congregationalists: "You represent a body of Southern churches that are just coming into this work, so that in your representative capacity you are more than a single individual or new family going into the Mission." James L. Barton to H.C. McDowell, 6 February 1918, HCM/Ang.2/2, Savery Library, Talladega College.

10. Albert J. Raboteau, " 'Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands': Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America," in A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 37-56; Walter Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 7-8..

11. "How Galangue Came Upon the Map," Cornelius Patton, 6 February 1928, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, v. 21, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

12. For the history of African Americans in the Congregational church see, Clara Merritt DeBoer, "Blacks and the American Missionary Association," in Hidden Histories of the United Church of Christ, edited by Barbara Brown Zikmund, (New York: United Church Press, 1984), 81-94; A. Knighton Stanley, The Children Is Crying: Congregationalism Among Black People (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979).

13. The AMA was not officially recognized as part of the Congregational church until 1913. A. Knighton Stanley, 20, 25.

14. For the AMA's work among the freed slaves see, Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Joe Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1986).

15. Lawrence W. Henderson, Galangue: The Unique Story of a Mission Station in Angola Proposed, Supported, and Staffed by Black Americans (NY: United Church Board for World Ministries, 1986), 8.

16. For increasing segregation of the Congregational church in the South, see Richard H. Taylor, Southern Congregational Churches (Benton Harbor, Michigan: 1994), 36-41; A. Knighton Stanley, 101-102. For discussions of interracial work and its difficulties during this time, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 177-78; Higginbotham, 89-90.

17. For the experiences of black missionaries on Congregational missions see Williams, 22; Sylvia M. Jacobs, "Give a Thought to Africa: Black Women Missionaries in Southern Africa," in Western Women and Imperialism, edited by Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 209-213; Henderson (1986), 10-11.

African American missionaries faced discrimination within predominately white mission societies, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, many predominately white mission societies stopped sending black missionaries to their missions. W.E.B. Du Bois, "Missionaries," Crisis, (May 1929): 168.

18. Henderson (1986), 12.

19. "How Galangue Came Upon the Map," Cornelius H. Patton, 6 February 1928, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, v. 21, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Black missionaries in southern Africa faced harassment and opposition to their work from colonial officials; colonial officials thought that black Americans would stir up resentment among Africans. See Carol A. Page, "Colonial reaction to AME Missionaries in South Africa, 1898-1910," in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, edited by Sylvia M. Jacobs, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), 177-196; Edwin W. Smith, The Christian Mission in Africa (London: International Missionary Council, 1926), 122-25.

20. "Good News for Africa," Missionary Herald, (November) 1918: 492; Henderson (1986), 30.

21. In 1917, 2,132 black Americans were enrolled in college; in 1927 there were 13,580. From David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 157-158.

22. Henderson (1986), 16-17, 27.

23. For information on the Galangue mission see, Lillie M. Johnson, "Missionary-Government Relations: Black Americans in British and Portuguese Colonies," in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, edited by Sylvia M. Jacobs (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), 197-215.

24. Missionaries, explorers, and tourists often used their experiences to provide education, presumably non-biased, about other peoples and places to their readers at home. For missionaries, Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and the Popular Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): 164-68. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).

25. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 39.

26. For African Americans' use of Africa in making history, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

27. For African Americans' valorization of the African past see, Moses; St. Claire Drake, The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (Chicago: Third World Press, 1970), 48-53; Kevin Gaines, "Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission': Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 433-455.

28. H.C. McDowell, Circular, 16 September 1919, HCM/Ang.2/4/3, Savery Library, Talladega College.

29. H.C. McDowell, circular, 13 March 1919, HCM/Ang 2/4/3, Savery Library, Talladega College.

30. Mrs. Samuel Coles, "The African Woman," The Amistad, (n.d.) in ABCFM archive, ABC 15:18, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

31. H.C. McDowell, "Galangue News," The Amistad (February 1935): 5.

32. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, "Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American Evangelical Women, 1870-1910," The Journal of American History, vol. 69, no. 2, (September 1982): 347-371.

33. For communist and UNIA activities in Africa see, Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, edited by Sidney LeMelle and Robin D.G. Kelley (London: Verso, 1994); Robert A. Hill and Gregory A. Pirio, "'Africa for the Africans': The Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920-1940," in The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, edited by Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (London: Longman, 1987): 209-253; Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).

34. H.C. McDowell to D.J. Flynn, 25 May 1920, HCM/Ang.2/5/1/, Savery Library, Talladega Library.

35. Samuel Coles to Earnest Riggs, 18 August 1922, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, v. 22, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

36. H.C. McDowell to Frank Brewer, 22 August 1922, HCM/Ang.2/7/2, Savery Library, Talladega College.

37. H.C. McDowell to National Convention of Congregational Workers Among Colored People, 12 July 1920, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, v. 23, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

38. H.C. McDowell to Enoch F. Bell, 22 September 1921, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, v. 23, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

39. H.C. McDowell, circular, 12 July 1920, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, vol. 23, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

40. H.C. McDowell to Dr. James L. Barton, 25 November 1919, HCM/Ang.2/4/4, Savery Library, Talladega College.

41. H.C. McDowell to B.F. Ousley, n.d., 1920?, HCM/Ang.2/5/1, Savery Library, Talladega College.

42. Samuel B. Coles, Preacher With A Plow0- (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957): 217-228.

43. "A New Year's Letter from Ochileso," Missionary Herald (May 1920): 242.

44. H.C. McDowell to Rev. Frank S. Brewer, 22 August 1922, HCM/Ang.2/7/2, Savery Library, Talladega College.

45. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this tension.

46. H.C. McDowell, circular, 9 October 1923, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, vol. 23, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

47. H.C. McDowell to Alfred Lawless, 1 June 1920, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.1, vol. 23, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

48. Coles, (1957), 155-176. In 1950 approximately 30,000 Angolans, out of a population of 4 million, were "assimilated." Eduardo de Sousa Ferreira, Portuguese Colonialism in Africa: The End of an Era (Paris: Unesco Press, 1974): 115.

49. H.C. McDowell to J.E.K. Aggrey, 26 January 1922, HCM/Ang.2/7/2, Savery Library, Talladega College.

50. H.C. McDowell to Robert S. Abbot, 6 February 1924, HCM/Ang.2/9/2, Savery Library, Talladega College.

51. Samuel B. Coles, circular, 30 August 1922, ABCFM archive, ABC 15.5, v. 22, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

52. Henderson (1986), 29-30; A. Knighton Stanley, 91-105; J.T. Stanley, 92-95.

53. Henderson (1986), 33-35.