January 13, 2002
First Sunday After Epiphany
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: A Voice From Heaven ~ Matthew 3:13-17
In some years past I’ve shared information about the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr., to help us all understand to a greater depth, the kinds of things that he did as he lived out his call to discipleship. As he lived out his life as a Christian and a follower of Jesus. As I mentioned earlier in this service, this year I wanted to look at the struggle for racial equality from another perspective. It was not only black people who were involved in the work for justice, but people of all kinds. That work for justice continues today. As we look at the history of our own denomination, going back to congregational roots, the struggle against racism has been a long and on-going struggle. In 1994, the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries published a calendar that celebrated the work of a previous organization called the American Missionary Association. That group was made up of people from a variety of church backgrounds, with a very strong part of the membership coming from the Congregationalists. They were active in the abolitionist efforts, before the Civil War and after the Civil War. So, today, the story will focus on our call to discipleship and the encouragement that we can find in looking back at what our ancestors in the faith did. It is important to recognize that the work that was done was not without controversy. There were disagreements along the way, about what it meant to be faithful. The steps that were taken to be faithful sometimes caused division in churches. The call to discipleship was the most important thing of all. So, listen to the story about how some of our ancestors lived out that call.
The American Missionary Association spearheaded the continuing struggle against slavery and worked for the full participation of all Americans in our society. Its “weapon” in this struggle was the Christian faith and a good education. It offered both to the poor and to the people of color on this continent and abroad.
The calendar that was published is in part out on the bulletin board in the narthex. During the coffee hour you can look at some of the pictures from that calendar. The calendar focuses strongly on the pioneering efforts to open schools for newly freed African-Americans of this country. To bring to them and to other people of color the educational and spiritual empowerment which were intended to give them freedom and to strengthen their equality. This effort is still far from finished. We know that there is racism yet in our society. There are inequalities of education and economic backgrounds.
The names of most of the brave women and men who, in the early days of the American Missionary Association’s life, put their skills and their lives in the service of God and their fellow human begins are unknown to us, and most rest now in unvisited graves. But their achievements, the things that they did, last far longer than their name recognition lasted. We who carry on this work today can only pray to God to give us strength and wisdom to continue to be worthy of the task which they began with such honor and faith.
The AMA was formed in 1846 to promote the cause of Christian abolitionism in the US. It supported missions in Africa and elsewhere in the world as well as in the United States and established schools for the freed African Americans throughout the South. The AMA worked constantly to raise funds for these causes. You can judge its success by the fact that of the twenty million dollars that was spent by the government and by private sources between 1861, the start of the Civil War and 1890 to help former slaves, one-third of that twenty million dollar figure came from the AMA and its supporters. People were repeatedly asked by the AMA to donate money and some of them said that the AMA stood for “after money again.” Those who benefited from all the generosity had an affectionate name for the AMA, “Aunt Mary Ann.” There are some logos out on the bulletin board from the early magazines of the association. Those logos show that it was not only African Americans but also people from a variety of different races that were helped by the efforts of the organization.
There were anti-slavery movements throughout the 1700’s in the American colonies and slavery was outlawed in several areas late in the century. Most abolitionists were churchgoers, but many churches accepted funds from slaveholders. You might remember an updating of that argument when the United Church of Christ, was speaking against apartheid in South Africa. The denomination called for individuals and churches to divest from any funds or any companies that were making money off of South Africa so that our retirement portfolios would not be made stronger by the racist policies in South Africa. This was an issue back in the 1700 and 1800’s also. Churches accepting funds from slaveholders had a conflict of interest. In protest, the AMA was created in 1846 combining a number of abolitionist groups. Three of the organizers were Lewis Tappan, who served as treasurer, Congregational Minister, James W.C. Pennington (an escaped slave & Founding President of the Union Missionary Society) and another pastor, George Whipple from Ohio.
The first issue of the AMA magazine promised to “preach the gospel to the poor, to assist feeble churches, sustain missionary operations amongst the free colored population, to preach deliverance to the crushed and stricken slave, to strengthen and extend the mission to the Indians, to work among the emancipated slaves of Jamaica, to help develop the Mendi Mission in Africa and to turn its earliest attention to India and to China. Part of the early motivation for the AMA comes in the story that will be familiar to you from the Stephen Spielberg movie of a couple years ago. It didn’t portray Congregationalists in a very good way but it was a very important event in our Congregational history in New England, particularly in Connecticut and Massachusetts. That is the story of the slave ship, The Amistad.
Africans taken as slaves were transported under inhuman conditions, packed into slave ships with no room to move, held shackled and without fresh air or proper sanitation. In July 1839 after being taken to Cuba on a Portuguese slaver, 53 captured Africans from what is now Sierra Leone boarded the schooner La Amistad (in Spanish that means friendship, an ironic name) to be taken to the other side of the island. Three days later after having been told by crew members that they were to be killed and eaten, the Africans, led by Cinque, rebelled, killing the captain and cook and forcing the crew to sail back toward Africa. But, at night the Cubans sailed north and northwest. After 63 days, the Coast Guard boarded the ship and forced it ashore in New Haven, CT. There abolitionists created the Mendi Committee to free the Africans. Seminarians and abolitionists raised money to clothe and feed them, and taught them English. After long and delicate negotiations between the American and Spanish governments (remember it was a Spanish ship), and with ex-president John Quincy Adams and Roger Sherman Baldwin joining in their legal defense, the United States Supreme Court held that the Mendians had been illegally kidnapped, and were now free to return home. This was something that was solved not with a battle, but in the courts and was a tremendously important decision.
In November 1841 the 35 surviving Mendians, with five missionaries and teachers, sailed home, to start a mission at Kaw Mendi, West Africa, with a church and a manual labor school. In 1846 there were 39 students. The 33 male apprentices learned to be carpenters and blacksmiths; the six females learned to cook, clean and sew. Over the years 49 missionaries were sent out; 16 died there, 13 returned ill, some remained for 20 years or more.
This was the first anti-slavery mission in Africa, opposing the slave trade, caste, polygamy, war and the use of intoxicating drinks. They proclaimed their beliefs to the authorities, missionaries and people of the British colony and also to the African chiefs who were prosecuting the internal slave-trade and waging cruel and bloody wars. The missionaries said that warring chiefs asked them to settle disputes. In 1882 the mission and its property were transferred to the United Brethren, as the AMA turned its attention solely to the American homeland.
By 1847 the AMA was beginning work with the Ojibwa (Chippewa) in the Minnesota Territory. Later work included the Hidatsa and Sioux, the Dakotas, the Menomonees and Oneidas (Wisconsin), the Skokomish (Washington Territory), and tribes in Nebraska and California. Policies of the American government encouraged Native Americans to become farmers, raising crops like wild rice, corn and cotton. It goes without saying once Native Americans became farmers, it could be argued that they no longer needed the huge expanses of land that had been deeded to them in treaties along the way; people pushed for those lands to become available to white settlers as they moved ever westward.
Most of the AMA leadership agreed with the settlement policy. But they recognized the abuses, fraud and prejudice which caused great suffering among the Native Americans from hunger, cold, illness and financial trickery. The Association spoke out against what they called “the heartless and grasping” greed of those who mistreated the Native Americans. As always, the AMA tried through education and conversion to Christianity to bring Native Americans into the majority culture, in the hope that they could achieve justice in their lives.
The AMA mission to Siam began in September 1848 when the Association still saw itself as a world missionary body. It supported the work of the Rev. Dr. Bradley, court physician to the wives and children of the King of Siam. Bradley tried in vain to convert the King, but the monarch, after reading Bradley’s Life of Christ, declared that in comparison with Buddha, Christ came in a poor second. No doubt Bradley’s insistence the King give up his many wives and concubines also discouraged the conversion. Not until the King’s son had succeeded to the throne was slavery abolished in Thailand, perhaps because the son had been tutored by an English governess. You all know the story of Anna and the King of Siam or the musical that’s known as The King and I.
Nevertheless, Bradley brought in many new medical and surgical practices, and his well-written letters provide fine descriptions of the country of Thailand. He described the countryside with very precise descriptions. He also left an excellent English-Thai dictionary. The mission there lasted 26 years, ending only when Bradley’s own son was too ill to continue the work of his father and mother.
Often the issue of slavery and abolition was so divisive within churches that they split apart. The AMA then gave financial assistance and/or ministerial support to the anti-slavery church. All AMA supported churches and schools aimed at integration, but few whites sent their children to the schools. Berea College in Kentucky was the only truly successful integrated AMA school during Reconstruction thanks to its founder John G. Fee, who said, “I believe we ought to make a school for all humanity.” The school remained integrated until 1904, when Kentucky passed a law prohibiting interracial education.
The AMA continued both to invite whites to enroll and to call for universal public education, but accepted its role in educating African Americans only. They believed that as educated African Americans passed uneducated southern whites by, the whites would wake up to their own need for education and would begin to call out for better schools. And by 1868 an AMA leader wrote that the whites were now pleading for the advantages of a common elementary and secondary school.
Immediately after the Civil War began, escaped slaves began to take refuge with the Union forces at Fortress Monroe. There at Hampton, VA, on September 17, 1861, the AMA opened the first school for freedmen, with Mrs. Mary Peake as teacher. Mary Smith Kelsey Peake, whose husband was a freed slave, was born in Norfolk, VA, daughter of a free black mother and a white European father, and had secretly taught slaves for years. Her school “stood on the coast where two hundred and forty-one years before, the first slave ship had landed. The school that she helped establish was the first school for African Americans in the slave states that had legal authority and the protection of the national guns. Mrs. Peake and that first slave ship represent two widely divergent eras – a barbarism and a civilization.” This was a comment from Fred L. Brownlee in a book called New Day Ascending. Mary Peake died of tuberculosis, but during the last months of her life, she taught her students from her deathbed.
The AMA had a belief that was revolutionary for its time: that there should be public education for everyone in the United States. That’s something that during much of our lifetime has been assumed. During the last ten years or so has been debated so that there are people who are ready to toss out the public school system and go to entirely private schools that will be driven by the market of demand. In the 1800’s, this idea of public school for everybody was a revolutionary thing. The AMA believed in particular that education would bring former slaves full equality. By 1863, the AMA had sent 83 AMA teachers to the South; by the end of the Civil War, there were over 300 teachers, in every state of the former Confederacy as well as in Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri. By the end of the Reconstruction period, there were over 500 schools and teachers.
Many schools began in churches, barracks and warehouses, or confiscated buildings; sometimes teachers held classes outdoors. The number of pupils under one teacher might be more than one hundred students, with several generations of one family frequently gathered together in the same class; W.E. Du Bois called this education crusade of the AMA the “finest thing in American history.”
Typically, the AMA classroom had students of all ages. Motivated by religion and patriotism, AMA teachers followed the Union soldiers south; some became casualties of the fighting. Teachers lived in very minimal conditions: cold in the winter, hungry much of the time, often poor or in debt, ostracized by southern whites. Some were whipped or killed; some succumbed to illnesses. Others devoted their entire lives to the cause, teaching, farming, and building to provide for their own needs and those of their students.
African-American teachers also pioneered schools, particularly in areas where whites could not easily go. By 1888 the AMA had trained at least 7000 black teachers, who influenced life in virtually every southern state. Later given over to state authorities, AMA schools helped lay the foundations of the public school system in several states. These teachers were heroes and heroines in every sense of the terms.
One of the schools was Trinity School in Athens, Alabama organized in 1865. Organizer Mary F. Wells, graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary (College) for Women in Massachusetts, had been a Civil War Army nurse and a Michigan schoolteacher. She “bravely faced social ostracism, personal threats, and insults, winning the affection of blacks and the grudging toleration of whites. For thirty years (the school) effectively taught students from the ABC’s to high school. Her pupils were far in advance of local whites of the same age, and scores of them became teachers and virtually monopolized black schools in the region.” In 1882 a black editor said that Wells had “done more toward elevating the Colored people in North Alabama than any other teacher, and should have a place in all our hearts.” (Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, U. of Ga. Press. 1986,p.115.)
The AMA wanted to instill a “pure practical Christianity” into its students, and religion was part of the curriculum. Many teachers followed Mary Peake’s example in the association’s first school and began the day with religious exercises. Trinity often held prolonged prayer meetings nightly, as well as frequent prayer during the day.
Even among the leaders of this movement, there was some disagreement. In the legacy there are two that stand as giants. Booker T. Washington, (1856-1915, Grad. Hampton Institute, 1875) was the most powerful African American of his day, Washington was born in Virginia, his mother a slave, his father an unknown white man. In 1872, he walked to Hampton Institute, where he worked as a janitor to pay his way. When he became principal of Tuskegee Institute (AL), he put into effect his conviction that education for African Americans should concentrate on job skills. Many other schools were founded on the Tuskegee model. A gifted writer and speaker, Washington, advocating racial solidarity and self-help, won the support of African-American businessmen throughout the country.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963, Grad. Fisk University, 1888) also studied at the University of Berlin and at Harvard. His doctoral dissertation, published in 1896, was the first book in the Harvard Historical Series. He charged that Booker T. Washington taught African Americans “to give up political power, civil rights, and higher education,” All this was the result of focusing primarily on job skills. Instead, he advocated for the development of a “Talented Tenth” of trained leaders. Du Bois founded and edited magazines and newspapers; he founded the Niagara Movement (opposed to Booker T. Washington’s efforts), and was a founder of the NAACP. Deeply involved in radical politics, he won the Lenin Prize and the World Peace Council Prize. Harassed by communist hunters in the United States, he became a citizen of Ghana in 1963. Du Bois was “a pioneer in the study of African history and culture, and led the way for African Americans to begin to seek out and learn about their African heritage.”
One of the important schools founded by the AMA provided a gift for all of us in the spirituals that had been slave songs but through a process at Fisk University became well loved around the world. The Fisk Jubilee Singers have been described as being one of the most dramatic stories in the history of education. Fisk University is in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded by the AMA in 1866. By the early 1870s, the AMA was deeply in debt, and fundraising was drying up. Remember the war now was over. There were those who felt that the issue of slavery was settled. People who had lost loved ones or even their homesteads turned to rebuild. Reluctantly the AMA began to permit colleges to fundraise on their own. It endorsed the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and provided them with an advance agent. Many of Fisk’s students could not pay tuition, and even though teachers preserved fruits and vegetables for later use, food was often scarce. In October 1871, a group of student singers, with an untrained musical director, George L. White, took most of Fisk’s remaining funds and traveled North to raise money.
At first, they sang what they called “white man’s music,” but then began to sing spirituals. “They soon recognized the intense effect of ‘slave songs’ even upon musically enlightened audiences. Their superlative renderings of spirituals brought respect, attention for Fisk, and money. They sang their say into the consciousness of both the US and Europe, and charmed the world with the beauty of black music. In the process they gave Fisk $150,000 and made it the best known black university in the world.” (Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, U. of Ga. Press, 1986, pp 126-7.)
May these stories inspire us to live our lives faithfully, working always for justice and racial equality. Amen.