Anyone who resided in Rochester, New York, in the final few decades of the twentieth century was likely familiar with the Reverend Raymond Graves. This longtime pastor of New Bethel Christian (formerly Colored) Methodist Episcopal Church left a large footprint in antiracist activism through insurgent organizations and initiatives for just policing, black employment opportunities, and equitable housing for the poor. Graves's ministry and that of other like-minded ministers and members of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (CME Church) contradicted an historical identity marker that wrongly described the denomination as inclined to accommodate a racial status quo of ordered social change that whites controlled. In fact, Graves was an heir to another founding thrust in CME origins too often unexamined in official and scholarly accounts of the denomination's early development.
The author, in her recovery of Isaac Anderson, a CME minister during the post–Civil War period, modeled Colored Methodist militancy that defied its deferential links to the formerly pro-slavery and racially conservative Methodist Episcopal (ME) Church, South. The book, a deep exploration of Reconstruction, religion, and miscegenation, reveals the complex interactions among these phenomena and their role in shaping the social dynamics of the postbellum American South. Jackson's seamless narrative about these intersecting subjects brings clarity to the complicated life of an ex-slave Colored Methodist Episcopal Church minister.
When the CME Church was established in 1870, it drew an influential leadership cadre from clergy who were mulattoes, including some whose white, slave-owning fathers kept them in bondage. Moreover, such CME founders as Isaac Lane and Lucius H. Holsey had been nurtured in the racial paternalism of the ME Church, South and believed that the CME Church should maintain amicable client relationships with this southern white ecclesia and adopt its view that African American Methodists should eschew politics as a vehicle to protect the newly won rights of ex-slaves. Anderson, a mulatto like Lane and Holsey, developed a different vision for Colored Methodism that more closely resembled the militant political involvements of the two northern-based African Methodist bodies. At the same time Anderson had complicated interactions with his former slaveowner and father, William Anderson, whose paradoxical roles as a political opponent and as a parental benefactor reflected the views of his peers in the Democratic Party and in the ME Church, South.
The senior Anderson hovered over the life of his slave son before the Civil War and was present as his political adversary during Reconstruction. This adventurer and entrepreneur pursued complicated trade relationships with Native Americans and established businesses in frontier settings in New Alabama and in the emerging entrepots of Macon and Fort Valley in Georgia. His mulatto offspring worked in the protected setting of his father's cotton mercantile. During Reconstruction the elder Anderson aligned with other ex-Confederates in the Georgia state senate to undermine the black franchise and to rob their elected representatives of their positions. Ousted and defeated black politicians, including Isaac Anderson, while they benefitted from federal protection, drew condemnation from William Anderson and other Democrats for their reliance on protections from the national government.
Isaac Anderson, defeated for office in 1868, the same year that his father attained a seat in the Georgia legislature, finally won an election in 1870, just as the CME Church emerged. As a state legislator, he supported bills that put him at odds with the elder Anderson, a prominent member of the ME Church, South and a railroad investor. The younger Anderson, aware that railroad officials had once used slave labor and now wanted to lease prison workers, many of whom were black,backed legislation to oppose this attempt at quasi-slavery. Moreover, he opposed white Democrats who tried to prevent federal investigations of Ku Klux Klan violence against blacks. He also introduced a bill calling for mixed-race juries for black defendants. Additionally, laws that infringed on the economic freedom of black sharecroppers won his support. Though many of these initiatives failed, Anderson strongly believed that the political involvement of CME clergy was a crucially important to their ministerial roles. He blended this activity to cooperation with the federal Freedmen's Bureau in operating schools for the newly emancipated.
The elder Anderson, like others in the ME Church, South, did not envisage equality for blacks either in the ecclesia or in politics. Whether African Americans, like Lucius Holsey, were deferential to whites, or were defiant, like Isaac Anderson, they believed that an autonomous and derivative denomination emerging out from southern white Methodists was best for ex-slaves. This desire for black ecclesiastical independence initially pulled Anderson into the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church) and into political collaboration with Henry M. Turner, that denomination's leading figure in Georgia politics. Disappointment with the financial insolvency of the AME Church publishing house in Philadelphia, however, pushed him into the CME fold, not unlike another AME, Richard Vanderhorst, an ex-slave who joined the CMEs and was elected a bishop. Another testament to Anderson's black consciousness was his impulse to connect to migrating blacks who were escaping racial oppression in Georgia. This led to his serial resettlement across to three locations in the Mid-South. He followed fellow black Georgians in an organized “exodus” to Arkansas, and then he migrated to northern Mississippi and next to Tennessee. In each area he served CME congregations, supervised them as a presiding elder, and was an agent for the denomination's newspaper, The Christian Index.
Although CMEs co-sponsored, with the ME Church, South, Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, and welcomed other funding for the denomination, Anderson connected with a significant corps of clergy who eschewed the racial conservatism of southern white Methodists. L. J. Scurlock, a CME minister from Mississippi, for example, opposed the nonpolitical posture of the CMEs and joined Anderson as a delegate to the 1872 Republican National Convention. There is no evidence that Anderson interacted with fellow Georgian, Henry Sebastian Doyle, but his conspicuous leadership in the 1890s with the Farmer's Alliance and the Populist Party reflected the same CME militancy that characterized Anderson's advocacy for black farmers.
This superb study refines standard accounts of the origin of the CME Church. Cast in the dynamics of ex-Confederate opposition to Reconstruction, the author argues that a phalanx of ecclesial and political leaders and vigilante groups were determined to eliminate the influence of newly enfranchised African Americans. These forces stirred aspirations for religious autonomy among black ME church, South members and motivated some, like Isaac Anderson, to envisage a politically involved CME Church. Though other historians have extensively chronicled Anderson's role in the founding and development of the denomination, only this book presents him as offering an alternate vision for a militant Colored Methodism that would be indistinguishable from politically active African Methodists in the postbellum American South.
