Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 1884-1916. By Lawrence S. Little. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Pp xvii + 256. $32.00, cloth.

It is axiomatic that the church, more so than any realm of public culture, was the center of nineteenth-century African-American life. Running through the fabric of religious culture were the threads of politics, reform, education, benevolence, and uplift, as well as those of spirituality. And the historical record is replete with evidence of how, whether in the denominational conference, the storefront, the campground or the hush arbor, black Americans pondered the worldly and the otherworldly to arrive at strategies for resistance and survival. Yet, too often historians of African-American religion have left churches standing apart, failing to make evident the complex interplay that gave rise to the aforementioned axiom. Enter Lawrence S. Little’s Disciples of Liberty, a rich and complex history that draws out the connections between the sacred and secular, thus making the case for the centrality of the church to not only to lived experience, but to our tellings of it.

As his subtitle, The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, suggests, Little has deliberately set out to bring together what have too often been distinct realms of analysis, African-American religious history and the history of U.S. diplomacy and foreign relations. The African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E. Church), between 1884 and 1916, Little explains, developed an international posture that incorporated various peoples—Caribbean and Pacific Islanders, American Indians, Hawaiians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Haitians and Africans—while also contemplating many conflicts generated by the world’s imperial powers, including the Spanish-American-Cuban War, the Irish struggle for home rule, the Boer War, the persecution of dissidents and Jews in Russia, the Greco-Turkish confrontation in the Mediterranean, the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Uprising, and the Russo-Japanese War. A.M.E. leaders, in Little’s words, “rode rather than resisted the imperial surge,” and found themselves wedged between American ideology and American racism, while acting as agents of Protestant evangelism and opponents of theories of racial inferiority (xiii-xiv).

Little explains that this engagement with world events gave rise to “conflict, dilemmas and contradictions within the church,” and a “contradictory rather than logical and systematic” foreign agenda. On the one hand, church leaders argued against the thrust the era’s imperial projects, calling for a global application of American ideals of liberty and self-determination and articulating an identification with oppressed people around the world. On the other hand, they functioned as “proactive agents in the spread of American civilization and American Protestant evangelism,” building schools and missions, serving in the military and diplomatic corps, and engaging in economic ventures and trade (xiii). Little has carefully analyzed denominational conference proceedings and made excellent use of the A.M.E. Church media, including the many newspapers and magazines that were a forum for the exchange of ideas. Out of the conflict and confusion of the era emerged one broadly held tenet: church leaders would oppose the spread of western racism abroad.

Some earlier histories have recognized the paradox that confronted A.M.E. Church leaders when examining southern African missionary endeavors. Most notably, James Campbell in his 1995 work, Songs of Zion, describes the striking ambivalence that some A.M.E. leaders evidenced toward European imperialism.¹ Little’s most significant contribution here is a departure from the existing literature in two inter-related directions. First, he rejects a “missionary work” frame of analysis, opting instead to situate A.M.E. Church leaders of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century in the context of the imperial age. There are continuities here with earlier missionary and emigration endeavors, but Little convincingly argues that the period is distinguished by the emergence of a church agenda shaped by a new world order. The imperial ambitions of the U.S. and many European powers were rationalized by resort to a robust brand of racism that had potent meaning for African-Americans struggling against the rise of a Jim Crow order at home. These were not old missionary dilemmas, but new contests over race and power in a fast changing world scene, of which the American South was but one site of contestation. With this departure from the constraints of a missionary frame, Little is also able to take his analysis beyond the already well-considered terrain of Africa. Indeed, Little demonstrates that church’s thinking on Africa during the imperial age was informed by contemporary contests in other parts of the world, including Europe and Asia. The absence of missionary ties did not prevent church leaders from developing a new perspective, one in which they understood themselves to be working in the interests of all people of color, indeed with all oppressed people throughout the world. Here, Little might have more deliberately tied his narrative to the existing literature on African Americans, imperialism and colonialism, such as Brenda Gayle Plummer’s Rising Wind, and Penny Von Eschen’s Race Against Empire, to more forcefully make this point.²

If Little has broken with earlier approaches that told this story as one about missions and Africa, he has also unfortunately let go of some of that literature’s richest questions. The first falls in the category of gender analysis. Little correctly notes that the age of imperialism was also an age of new power and authority for churchwomen. Through missionary societies and offices such as that of the Deaconess, women were taking part in the emerging discourse on foreign affairs. Yet, the voices of these female church leaders are largely silent throughout Little’s text. This silence is of special note given that the age of imperialism was also termed the “woman’s era” by many contemporaries. And, as William Becker has argued in his essay “The Black Church: Manhood and Missions,” the foreign field had long been a site for assertions of manhood. How were changing notions of manhood and womanhood, ideas that were by then end of the nineteenth century intertwined with ideals of liberty and self-determination, part of the new ideas about which Little writes? Also silent are the voices of the many oppressed peoples about whom A.M.E. leaders were so concerned. Little’s analysis makes the case for a complex dialogue between church leaders and the Western diplomatic and military communities, but never takes up the ideas of the many who were the on the front lines of the imperial project. As James Campbell illustrates in his study of A.M.E. encounters in southern Africa, black Methodists from the U.S. soon found themselves challenged and changed through their engagement with those they imagined to be the subjects of their benevolence. The discourse that evolved during the age of imperialism was hardly a one-sided or solely Western one, but readers will be left wondering how the many oppressed peoples responded to the ideas of A.M.E. leaders, and, in turn, how church leaders’ ideas were transformed through such encounters.

These omissions do not, however, undermine the contributions made by Little’s book. Its compelling quality ensures that subsequent historians will follow to make explicit the relationship of African-Americans’ pre-World War I engagement with foreign affairs, imperialism and colonialism with similar confrontations during the Cold War era. Others will find in Little’s work on opening through which to bring African-American women, particularly churchwomen, more directly into our understandings of twentieth-century politics. For these scholars, and more, Lawrence Little’s Disciples of Liberty will be an indispensable text.

1. James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

2. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan