Throughout the nineteenth century, the status of both free and enslaved African Americans in the United States dominated discussions within the Black community and represented no small point of debate outside of it. Free Blacks faced the problem of laying claim to the rights and privileges of their American nationality during a time in which they were treated as second-class citizens. This paper examines how Black Christians contributed to the solutions African Americans sought to the challenges to their American nationality in the nineteenth century. These contributions centered around the theological concepts of a strong articulation of God’s providence, appropriation of the Exodus narrative to the African American experience, and a group messianism, especially with regard to missions to Africa, rooted in Psalm 68:31.
Nineteenth century Black Christians participated in early Black nationalist movements, including those that promoted voluntary emigration to Africa through the African Civilization Society before and after emancipation. Others joined in advocating for assimilation into the only nation they had known, with some antebellum Black Christians, such as David Walker (1796–1830) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882), endorsing violence, if necessary. The promises of a new post-emancipation racial order led to increased support for assimilationism and integration, seen most notably in the sharp increase in political participation on the part of Black clergy like Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915). Yet the overthrow of Reconstruction led Turner and others to a despairing attempt to revive emigration to Africa. In wrestling with their American nationality, Black Christians relied on language and ideas from the Christian tradition to sustain themselves and their community through slavery, Reconstruction, and the beginnings of Jim Crow segregation, and their contextual realities reveal complexity.
Questions of nationality occupy a significant place in African American historiography. Wilson Jeremiah Moses identified the nineteenth century as The Golden Age of Black Nationalism (Oxford, 1988), with the emergence of an ideology focused on self-determination and an independent nation-state based on the shared ethnicity of African Americans. Mark Newman in Black Nationalism in American History (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) drew a distinction between nationalists and assimilationists, but emphasized the dynamic as responsive to historical context and complexity. Less studied but still acknowledged is the role religion, and especially Christianity, played in debates regarding African American nationality. Albert Raboteau (A Fire in the Bones, Beacon Press, 1995) recognized the sense of God’s providence and mission adopted by African Americans through the Exodus text as well as Psalm 68:31, while Eddie Glaude (Exodus!, University of Chicago Press, 2000) detailed the importance of the Exodus narrative for racial advocacy among antebellum Black Christians. This paper examines the intersection between conceptions of nationality and theological thinking and how Black Christians used theology to understand, advance, or even repudiate their nationality.