Notes to Chapter 4
Taking Ownership

1. Two prominent Africanists have argued that slaves arriving from Central Africa had actually begun their creolization process in Africa. See Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

2. Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23.

3. My understanding of the African elements of the African American worldview is based on the following works: Henry H. Mitchell, Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America and West Africa (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Karin Barber, “How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes towards the ‘Orisa,’” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 51 (1981): 724–45; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Peter J. Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995); Samuel K. Roberts, In the Path of Virtue: The African American Moral Tradition (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1999).

4. Robert H. Nassau, Where Animals Talk: West African Folk Lore Tales (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1912), 126–28; Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), 525.

5. Holifield, 377–94; Jason R. Young, “Spirituality and Socialization in the Slave Community,” in A Companion to African American History, ed. Alton Hornsby Jr. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 183.

6. “Means of Elevation—No. III,” The Colored American, July 20, 1839.

7. Roberts, 15–17.

8. Patricia Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 1–24; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1979; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3–15.

9. “A Pioneer Negro Society, 1787,” in Aptheker, 18; “Rules of an Early Negro Society, 1796,” in Aptheker, 39; Roberts, 15, 34; Robert L. Harris Jr., “Early Black Benevolent Societies, 1780–1830,” Massachusetts Review 20 (1979): 603–25.

10. “Speech by William Whipper,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 3, ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 125; Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored People, and Their Friends, 1847, in Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, ed. Howard H. Bell (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 17.

11. “To the People of Color throughout New England,” The Liberator, September 17, 1836; “Temperance,” The Colored American, August 31, 1839.

12. “Colored Temperance Convention,” The Liberator, July 30, 1836; “A Call to the Colored Citizens of Maine and New-Hampshire,” The Colored American, September 4, 1841.

13. “Rumselling and Pro-Slavery,” The Colored American, March 20, 1841; “Temperance Address,” Palladium of Liberty, June 12, 1844; Minutes of the Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States, 1835, in Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, 8; Carlson, 685–86.

14. Block, 9–24.

15. Minutes of the Third Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1875), 12, BAP; Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1875), 12, (1877), 17, (1882), 21, SCMU; Minutes of the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia (1876), 29, SCMU; Minutes of the New Hope Baptist Association (1887), 6, SCMU; “Temperance Committees,” Christian Recorder, November 19, 1885.

16. Minutes of the Eleventh Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1884), 25, BAP; Minutes of the Seventeenth Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1889), 47, BAP.

17. Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1875), 12, (1880), 11, (1891), 16, SCMU; Minutes of the New Hope Baptist Association (1887), 17, SCMU; Wills, 52–54.

White evangelical clergy spoke of intemperance as a threat to the Church and state just like black clerics. See Larry Jerome Watson, “Evangelical Protestants and the Prohibition Movement in Texas, 1887–1919” (PhD diss., Texas A & M University, 1993), 25–27.

18. Although since the 1830s the AME Church had defined intemperance as drinking any intoxicating beverage, it is not clear from the reports that black Baptists held this position as late as the 1870s. In the earlier years after the war the language of some Baptist reports suggests that they only opposed the use of distilled spirits.

19. For some examples of the use of Scriptural arguments, see Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1867), 11, SCMU; Minutes of the New Hope Baptist Association (1882), 13, SCMU; Minutes of the Friendship Baptist Association (1889), 5, SCMU.

20. Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1887), 14, SCMU.

21. Minutes of the Eleventh Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1884), 25, BAP. For another similar account see Minutes of the New Hope Baptist Association (1887), 6, SCMU.

22. Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1884), 16, SCMU. For other similar arguments see Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1882), 15, (1886), 26, SCMU.

23. Minutes of the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia (1875), 27, SCMU.

24. Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1885), 22, SCMU.

25. Minutes of the Second Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1875), 12, BAP; Minutes of the New Hope Baptist Association (1873), 8, (1876), 11, (1877), 12, (1887), 6, (1889), 14, SCMU; Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1882), 21, (1886), 10, (1887), 14, (1889), 15, SCMU. This rhetoric can also be understood as the African American version of the white jeremiad tradition. See Matthew James Zacharias Harper, “Living in God’s Time: African-American Faith and Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2009), 172–209.

26. Minutes of the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia (1875), 12, (1877), 17, (1880), 11, (1885), 21, SCMU; Minutes of the Eleventh Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1884), 25, BAP; Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1875), 12, (1887), 14, (1889), 15, SCMU; Minutes of the New Hope Baptist Association (1876), 11, (1884), 14, (1887), 6, SCMU.

27. David Wood Wills, “Aspects of Social Thought in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1884–1910” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1975).

28. Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion: A Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865–1900 (1967; repr., Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 5–9; Foy Valentine, “Baptist Polity and Social Pronouncements,” Baptist History and Heritage 14 (July 1979): 52–61; Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 168–80; Leroy Fitts, A History of Black Baptists (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1985), 243.

Not only did the associations and conventions have little coercive authority, but Harvey argues that they also received little support from congregations, financially or otherwise, because of their commitment to localism, further weakening their ability to exercise “control.” Harvey, 62–63.

29. Reprint of the First Edition of the Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Atlanta: n.p., 1917), 58–59; Edward L. Wheeler, Uplifting the Race: The Black Minister in the New South, 1865–1902 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1982), 11; Minutes of the Sixteenth Session and Fifteenth Quadrennial Session of the General Conference of the AME Church (1876), 129, BAP.

30. Those with voting authority at an annual conference included all the traveling elders, deacons, licentiates, and local preachers (who had been so for at least four years).

31. The Doctrine and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: AME Book Concern, 1885), 137–39, 148–52; “That’s the Way to Reform,” Christian Recorder, July 2, 1885; “Temperance Committees,” Christian Recorder, November 19, 1885; Larry Murphy, “Education and the Preparation for the Ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1787 to 1900 (Conclusion),” AME Church Review 101 (July–September 1986): 25–34; Fifteenth Quadrennial Session of the General Conference of the AME Church (1872), 85, BAP.

32. Harvey, 170–71; Wheeler, 7–8, 81; C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 13–16; Journal of the American National Baptist Convention (Louisville: The Bradley & Gilbert Company, Printers, 1892), 57, SCMU.

33. I found one case where, because of family connections, members of a western AME conference voted into the ministry a man whom several of them had personally seen drunk on multiple occasions. See “A Conference Temperance Report,” Christian Recorder, December 25, 1890.

34. “The Christian’s Bible vs. The Methodist Book of Discipline,” Christian Index and South-Western Baptist, September 12, 1878.

35. Minutes of the Fifth Annual Session of the Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1871), 13, BAP; Minutes of the First Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1874), 19, BAP; Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1885), 26, BAP. The Baptist polity quote comes from the white Baptist Convention of Georgia, but the polity issues were essentially the same for black Baptists. See Minutes of the Baptist Convention of Georgia (1887), 24, SCMU.

Various people have weighed in on the matter of the moral and intellectual “fitness” of late nineteenth-century black clergy and the effectiveness of black churches in addressing the matter. Bishop Daniel Payne and Booker T. Washington saw little difference between black Baptist and Methodist clergy, thinking very little of both groups. Payne believed only one-third of all black clergy were mentally and morally qualified, while Washington thought only one-fourth were. See Dennis C. Dickerson, Religion, Race and Region: Research Notes on A.M.E. Church History (Nashville: AMEC Sunday School Union/Legacy Pub, 1995), 40. Gregory Wills argues for the rigor of the black Baptist credentialing process, but the ongoing problem with drinking among the Baptist clergy undermines Wills’s view. See Wills, 79. William Montgomery believes that Baptist associations and conventions did exercise meaningful control over their members, contrary to how the Baptist polity was supposed to work. See William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 116–17. I have discussed this issue with Robert Gardner, a leading scholar of Georgia Baptist history. Gardner is perhaps the only person who has read through the extant records of every black Baptist association and convention in Georgia during the late nineteenth century, and his conclusion is that “My impression is that there was little ‘control’ exercised, real or otherwise, over churches by associations and denominations.” Robert Gardner, e-mail message to author, March 21, 2005.

36. Minutes of the Sixth Annual Session of the Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1872), 71, BAP; Minutes of the Third Annual Session of the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church (1875), 21, BAP; Minutes of the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia (1876), 29, (1881), 19, (1882), 35, BAP; Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Association (1875), 12, SCMU.

37. “Antis Grand Rally,” Atlanta Constitution, November 21, 1885; Spain, 182; Minutes of the Baptist Convention of Georgia [White] (1879), 22, (1880), 25, (1882), 21, (1887), 24, SCMU.

38. W. S. Harwood, “Secret Societies in America,” North America Review 164 (May 1897): 617–24. Harwood’s statistics only include black Odd Fellows and Masons, omitting many other black fraternities. See also David T. Beito, “To Advance the ‘Practice of Thrift and Economy’: Fraternal Societies and Social Capital, 1890–1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (Spring 1999): 585–612.

39. Edward Aiken, The Claims of the Order of Good Templars upon Temperance Men, Women and Youth (New Brighton, PA: D. R. Johnson, n.d.), 3.

40. David M. Fahey, Temperance and Racism: John Bull, Johnny Reb, and the Good Templars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 11–13; Fahey, “How the Good Templars Began: Fraternal Temperance in New York State,” The Social History of Alcohol Review nos. 38–39 (1999): 17–27.

41. In fraternal orders each local lodge must receive a charter to be considered legitimate. There were different sources from which to receive a charter, depending on the rules of the order and its stage of development. Generally, when a new order was created the first lodge to organize assumed the right to issue charters to other lodges. If there were enough lodges to form a statewide lodge, then that body issued charters. The state lodge was often called the “Grand Lodge.” When a national lodge was organized it was also called a “Grand Lodge,” and it also had authority to grant charters. In this case it appears that Browne applied to the national Grand Lodge.

42. D. Webster Davis, The Life and Public Services of William W. Browne (Philadelphia: AME Book Concern, 1910), 51–56; David M. Fahey, The Black Lodge in White America: “True Reformer” Browne and His Economic Strategy (Dayton, OH: Wright State University Press, 1994), 13–15; James D. Watkinson, “William Washington Browne and the True Reformers of Richmond, Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1989): 376–78; Henry A. Scomp, King Alcohol in the Realm of King Cotton (Blakely, GA: Blakely Printing Company, 1888), 722–23.

43. The other three were John W. Drew of New Hampshire, and Mother Eliza Stewart and Frances Willard representing the WCTU. They will be discussed in the next chapter.

44. Thrower spoke at Spelman, and probably other black schools. See Spelman Messenger 6 (December 1890): 5.

45. “True Reformers,” Atlanta Constitution, November 29, 1873; “U.O. of T. R.,” Atlanta Constitution, October 29, 1874; “U. O. T. R.,” Atlanta Constitution, September 4, 1875; “United Order of True Reformers,” Savannah Tribune, February 5, 1876.

46. “United Order of True Reformers of Georgia, Office Grand Worthy Master of the State,” box 9, William A. Pledger Scrapbook, John E. Bryant Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

47. “Colonel William Anderson Pledger—Race Leader, Editor, Lawyer, Politician and Patriot,” Atlanta Age (1904), clipping in William A. Pledger Biographical Vertical File, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Archives and Special Collections, AUC; Cyrus F. Adams, “Colonel William A. Pledger, The Forceful Orator and Fearless Editor,” Colored American Magazine 5 (1902): 146–48; “Letter Book of W. A. Pledger,” box 9, John E. Bryant Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

48. Minutes of the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia (1876), 29.

49. “True Reformers,” Atlanta Constitution, September 3, 1875; “U. O. T. R.,” Atlanta Constitution, September 4, 1875.

50. For some reason the Right Worthy Grand Lodge of the World did not have much success in signing up Georgia’s True Reformer lodges. Although in 1881 they appointed an Atlanta schoolteacher and Methodist minister, Charles P. Wellman, to recruit True Reformers, he seems to have spent most of his time in Tennessee and Alabama. “Good Templary,” Christian Recorder, October 6, 1881.

51. Fahey, Black Lodge, 14; International Order of Good Templars, Georgia Grand Lodge, An Appeal from the Temperance Workers of Georgia to the Officers and Members of the Right Worthy Grand Lodge I.O.G.T. in behalf of the Colored People of the South (Atlanta, 1882), 1–3. For a full discussion of the impact of the IOGT schism on black Templars see Fahey, Temperance and Racism, 105–25.

The AME’s Christian Recorder became the official organ of the U.S. lodges of the RWGL of the World. Pledger’s resignation was not based on some animus toward temperance fraternities per se, for in the Athens Blade he promoted temperance fraternity-related causes. See Athens Blade, February 6, 1880.

52. Fahey, Temperance and Racism, 110–11; “Atlanta’s Colored People,” American Missionary 34 (October 1880): 292; “Town Topics,” Atlanta Constitution, June 13, 1877; “Colored Good Templars,” Atlanta Constitution (October 1878); “Georgia,” National Temperance Advocate, April 1882, 61; “Dual Grand Lodge of Good Templars,” Southern Recorder, October 2, 1886.

53. Scomp, 721–22; Howard H. Turner, Turner’s History of the Independent Order of Good Samaritans and Daughters of Samaria (Washington, DC: R. A. Waters, 1881), 18–27, 63–64.

54. Scomp, 721–22; E. R. Carter, Biographical Sketches of Our Pulpit (1888; repr., Chicago: Afro-Am Press, 1969), 161–63.

55. Scomp, 721; “Good Samaritans,” Atlanta Constitution, March 18, 1876; Turner, 155; E. R. Carter, The Black Side: A Partial History of the Business, Religious, and Educational Side of the Negro in Atlanta, Georgia (Atlanta, 1894), 26; “The Good Samaritans,” Atlanta Constitution, September 8, September 11, 1891; “Their Convention Over,” Atlanta Constitution, September 12, 1891.

56. Carter, Black Side, 27; “Benevolent Association,” Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1876; “Good Samaritans Dedicate Their New Hall,” Atlanta Times, June 28, 1890; “The Good Samaritans,” Atlanta Constitution, June 23, 1890; Dorsey, 109.

57. David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 20–21.

58. Carter, Black Side, 41; “The Temperance Mutual Benefit Association of Philadelphia,” Southern Recorder, October 29, 1886; Southern Recorder, September 30, 1887; “Colored Benevolence,” Atlanta Constitution, November 13, 1883; Hunter, 70–73.

59. “Atlanta’s Colored People,” American Missionary 34 (October 1880): 292; Harris, 611.

60. “Colored Odd Fellows,” Atlanta Constitution, April 30, 1872; Charles B. Wilson, Official Manual and History of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America (Philadelphia: George F. Lasher, 1894), 313, 320; “Atlanta’s Colored People,” American Missionary 34 (October 1880): 292; “The Odd Fellows,” Southern Recorder, March 9, 1888.

61. William A. Muraskin, Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 43–74; Mark C. Carnes, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37–66; “Colored Odd Fellows,” Atlanta Constitution, April 30, 1872; “Colored Odd Fellows Anniversary,” Atlanta Daily Herald, May 13, 1873; “G. U. O. F.” Daily Evening Commonwealth, February 2, 1875; “A Colored Gathering,” Atlanta Constitution, February 11, 1879; “The Colored Odd Fellows,” Atlanta Constitution, October 7, 1880.

62. In the late 1800s there was a move among the white Masons to get their whole organization to take a strong prohibitionist stand and ban saloon keepers from membership, but many members objected. Many white Masons defined temperance as not drinking to excess rather than total abstinence. Most probably drank but “wouldn’t be caught dead, drunk.” Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 75–80.

63. “G.U.O.F.” Daily Evening Commonwealth, February 2, 1875; “Atlanta’s Colored People,” American Missionary 34 (October 1880): 292; “Police Court,” Atlanta Daily Herald, March 11, 1873.

64. “What Atlanta University has done for Georgia,” Bulletin of Atlanta University, January 1888, 5; Bulletin of Atlanta University, January 1896, 4; “From Mr. Hershaw’s Address,” Bulletin of Atlanta University, May 1897, 3; Jennifer Lund Smith, “The Ties that Bind: Educated African-American Women in Post-Emancipation Atlanta,” in Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865–1950, ed. John C. Inscoe (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 91–105.

65. DuBois, Souls, 3; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 33.