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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2021
In the Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg's experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia's legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg's case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.
I'd like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose generous and thoughtful feedback helped me revise this article. I would also like to thank my colleagues who have read and commented on various versions of this piece and encouraged its development: Vaughn Booker, Brandon Bayne, Cara Burnidge, Emily Clark, Matthew Cressler, Jamil Drake, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Brett Grainger, Rachel Gross, M. Cooper Harriss, Justine Howe, Elizabeth Jemison, Kathryn Lofton, Lerone Martin, Eziaku Nwokocha, Sally Promey, Timothy Rainey, II, Daniel Vaca, Judith Weisenfeld, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and Tisa Wenger. Special thanks for the editorial support of Ulrike Guthrie. All errors and omissions are my own.
1 George F. Bragg, A Bond-Slave of Christ: Entering the Ministry under Great Difficulties ([Baltimore?]: [Publisher not identified], 1912), 3. A note on capitalization: Throughout this piece I have capitalized Black and White when referring to people in order to acknowledge the growing sensibilities around race as an indicator of belonging to community and of the political ideas associated therewith in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
2 In 1884, the Branch Theological School was renamed Bishop Payne Divinity School and Industrial School. In 1910, it was renamed Bishop Payne Divinity School; in May 1949 it closed and subsequently merged with Virginia Theological Seminary in 1953. “Bishop Payne Divinity School.” A Episcopal Dictionary of the Church. Accessed September 6, 2021, from https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/bishop-payne-divinity-school/.
3 Bragg reports that he was fifteen when he enrolled in the BTS in January 1879. Perhaps he was about to turn sixteen, if his enrollment occurred earlier than his January 25 birthdate. Bragg, George F., The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese (Baltomore: s.n., 1901), 16Google Scholar, 18; Bragg, George F., The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil (Baltimore, MD: The Church Advocate Print, 1909), 40Google Scholar, 47; Bragg, “A Bond-Slave of Christ,” 1, 11; Bragg, George F., The Hero of Jerusalem: In Honor of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of General William Mahone of Virginia (Baltimore, MD: N.P., 1926), 9Google Scholar; African American National Biography, 2nd ed., s.v.; “Bragg, George Freeman, Jr.,” Warren County, North Carolina, Genealogy and History: Volunteers Dedicated to Genealogy. Transcription of Who's Who in the Colored Race, vol. 1, ed. Frank Lincoln Mathers, 1915. Transcribed by Andrea Stawski Pack, accessed June 11, 2020, from http://genealogytrails.com/mcar/warren/biographies.html.
4 Hahn, Steven, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003)Google Scholar; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective, Black Literature and Culture, ed. Houston Baker Jr. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
5 Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1986); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia, Kindle ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Clarence E. Walker, A Rock in a Weary Land: The African Methodist Episcopal Church during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); 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). Reginald F. Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Emily Suzanne Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth Century New Orleans (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Elizabeth L. Jemison, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
6 Recent works build on a recurring theme in the historiography of religion in the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. Nicole Myers Turner, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Matthew Harper, The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016). For a good survey of the literature on the civil rights movement and religions and a call for a revised approach to narrating the relationship between black religions and politics, see Vaughn Booker, “Civil Rights Religion? Rethinking 1950s and 1960s Political Activism for African American Religious History,” Journal of Africana Religions 2, no. 2 (2014). For works on the antebellum black religious and political culture, see P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson, eds., The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Waldo E. Martin Jr. and Patricia Sullivan (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Kellie Carter Jackson, Force or Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Patrick Rael, ed., African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2008); Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Eddie Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
7 Studies like Lincoln and Mamiya's The Black Church reinforce the identification of “The Black Church” as only the separate black denominations of the National Baptist Convention, Progressive National Baptist Convention, African Methodist Episcopal, and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, and explicitly exclude the Episcopal and Catholic Churches. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). More recently, vibrant strands of research on Black Catholics have emerged. See, for instance, Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Shannen Dee Williams, “‘You Could Do the Irish Jig, but Anything African Was Taboo’”: Black Nuns, Contested Memories, and the 20th Century Struggle to Desegregate U.S. Catholic Religious Life,” The Journal of African American History 102, no. 2 (2017); Dianne Batts Morrow, Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828–1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002); James B. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
8 Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008), 3, chapter 1, 278, 80. For another compelling analysis of the development of the concept of “the Negro Church,” see Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxord: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. chapters 3–4.
9 August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963).
10 Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); John Rodriguez, “Black Agency after Slavery,” in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, “Echoes of War: Rethinking Post–Civil War Governance and Politics,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); William A. Link and James J. Broomall, eds., Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom, Cambridge Studies on the American South, eds. Mark M. Smith and David Moltke-Hansen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Kidada Williams, “Maintaining a Radical Vision of African Americans in the Age of Freedom,” Journal of the Civil War Era (2016), https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies/maintaining-a-radical-vision/.
11 A robust literature on the history of African American education highlights the agency of enslaved and free Black people in pursing and shaping educational opportunities while confronting white racism. Notable selections include James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Stephanie Y. Evans, Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954: An Intellectual History, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Stephanie R. Wright, “Self-Determination, Politics, and Gender on Georgia's Black College Campuses, 1875–1900,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 92, no. 1 (2008); Ronald E Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Hilary Green, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Jelani Favors, Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
12 Julius H. Bailey, Race Patriotism: Protest and Print Culture in the AME Church (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2012); Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010), chapter 4; Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, The Burdens of Church History, vol. 82 (2013).
13 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, 10. On the theme of self-determination in African American political and cultural history, see Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); V. P. Franklin, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1984). For a view that complicates the notion of black self-determination, see Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), especially chapter 4. Bragg's career included publishing newspapers, first The Lancet (1882–1886), then The Afro-American Churchman, and later The Church Advocate (1889–1917). These publications reveal a portion of Bragg's political project in just the fact of creating newspapers about and for Black people. But this essay focuses specifically on his historical writing as a particular form of political activity and identity formation.
14 Favors, Shelter in a Time of Storm.
15 Favors, Shelter in a Time of Storm, 11.
16 Daniel O. Aleshire, Beyond Profession: The Next Future of Theological Education, Theological Education between the Times, ed. Ted A. Smith (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2021).
17 Bragg, The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil, 56.
18 William A. Daniel, The Education of Negro Ministers, Based upon a Survey of Theological Schools for Negroes in the United States (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1925).
19 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 25.
20 Daniel, The Education of Negro Ministers.
21 See, for example, letters in the Correspondence, 1879, Box 1, Folder 14, Richmond Theological Seminary Papers, Virginia Union University, Richmond, Virginia.
22 Bragg notes that Atwell was the first black clergyman he ever saw: Bragg, The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese.
23 Black educational advancement after Emancipation and Reconstruction also prompted white violence in the form of lynching. For more discussion, see Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
24 Journal of the Eighty-Fourth Annual Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia, Held in St. George's Church, Fredericksburg, on the 21st, 22d, 23d and 24th May, 1879 (Richmond: Wm. Ellis Jones, Steam Book and Job Printer, 1879), 37; Journal of the Eighty-Fifth Annual Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia Held in St. Paul's Church, Petersburg, on the 19th, 20th, 21st and 22d May 1880 (Richmond: Wm. Ellis Jones, Steam Book and Job Printer, 1880), 60; Turner, Soul Liberty.
25 George F. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (Baltimore, MD: Church Advocate Press, 1922), chapter 14.
26 See also Turner, Soul Liberty, chapter 4.
27 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 123.
28 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 129.
29 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 129.
30 Evans, Burden of Black Religion.
31 Bragg and other students at the Bishop Payne Divinity School contested Cooke's claims that he founded the Divinity School. Edward L. Bond and Joan R. Gundersen, “The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 115, no. 2 (2007): 286–87.
32 Bond and Gundersen, “The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007,” 286–87.
33 Russell, Adventure in Faith, 1936; Tang of the South, in Giles B. Cooke Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia.
34 Bragg, The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese, 7.
35 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 132–33.
36 George F. Bragg, Afro-American Church Work and Workers (Baltimore, MD: Church Advocate Press, 1904), 24.
37 Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
38 On Bragg as one of first students at BTS, see Bragg, The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese, 5.
39 Bragg, The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese, 18.
40 Bragg, “A Bond-Slave of Christ,” 8.
41 Bragg had ceased his political engagement by the time the Readjuster Movement submitted to white supremacist arguments that black men should not hold the highest offices at the national level.
42 Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 43–45; James Tice Moore, Two Paths to the New South: The Virginia Debt Controversy, 1870–1883 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 64–65.
43 Turner, Soul Liberty, 113–18; Moore, Two Paths to the New South; Dailey, Before Jim Crow.
44 Bragg, The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese, 18.
45 Bragg, The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese, 18; Bragg, “A Bond-Slave of Christ,” 1–2; George F. Bragg et al., “Additional Information and Correction in Reconstruction Records,” The Journal of Negro History 5, no. 2 (April 1920): 242.
46 Bragg, “A Bond-Slave of Christ,” 10.
47 Jane Dailey writes how Readjusters from the mid to late 1870s were most concerned with the principle of voting participation, not race of voters. Dailey, Before Jim Crow.
48 Bragg et al., “Additional Information and Correction,” 243.
49 Bragg et al., “Additional Information and Correction.”
50 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 151.
51 “Proposed canon of Missionary organizations within Constituted Episcopal Jurisdictions,” Journal of the General Convention (1883), 597, quoted in Harold T. Lewis, Yet with a Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), 68.
52 Bond and Gundersen, “The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007,” 287.
53 Bond and Gundersen, “The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007,” 287.
54 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 151–61; Bragg, Afro-American Church Work and Workers.
55 Stephen G. Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 4.
56 Bragg reproduces Richard Allen's account of the decision to unite with the Episcopal Church—“The Church of England”—even though Allen and Absalom Jones wanted to remain in the Methodist Church. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 51.
57 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 53.
58 Bailey, Race Patriotism, xi–xii.
59 Bailey, Race Patriotism, xii–xiii.
60 For an argument about the narrative of political resistance being subsumed under more conservative practices of institutional preservation, see Dennis C. Dickerson, The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
61 See, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994, 1903).
62 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, chapter 5.
63 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, chapter 5.
64 Bragg, The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil, 17.
65 Bragg, The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil, 10, 12, 49.
66 George F. Bragg, Men of Maryland, (Baltimore, MD: Church Advocate Press, 1914), 86.
67 Bragg, The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil, 12.
68 Dickerson, The African Methodist Episcopal Church.
69 George F. Bragg, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones (Baltimore: Church Advocate Press, 1915).
70 Dickerson, The African Methodist Episcopal Church.
71 Allen and the AME Church responded to Hezekiah Grice's suggestion and convened the first Colored Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1830.
72 Bragg, “Richard Allen and Absalom Jones.”
73 Bragg, Afro-American Church Work and Workers, 22.
74 Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal: An African American Anthology, edited by Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, and Ellis D. Williams (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000).
75 In 1849, the Reverend Eli Stokes, who pastored Christ Church in Providence, Rhode Island, traveled to England to raise money. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 104.
76 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 251–52.
77 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 256–57.
78 Bragg, The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil, 40, 42.
79 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 100.
80 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 100.
81 Bragg, “A Bond-Slave of Christ: Entering the Ministry under Great Difficulties.”
82 On the zeitgeist scholarship, see Savage, Your Spirits Walk beside Us.
83 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, chapter 32. Bragg also articulates the idea that black ministers who receive financial support from the Bishops are lazy and are not motivated to make change. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 256–57.
84 Bragg, “Richard Allen and Absalom Jones.”
85 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 118.
86 Bragg, The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese.
87 See, for example, Bragg's accounts of the first black Episcopal Churches and their leaders and their leaders’ lineages in Bragg, Afro-American Church Work and Workers, 14.
88 Lewis, Yet with a Steady Beat.
89 Jackson, Jerma, Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar, chapter 1.
90 George F. Bragg, “Are Other Than Baptist and Methodist Churches Adapted to the Present Negro,” in Twentieth Century Negro Literature: Or a Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro by One Hundred of America's Greatest Negroes, ed. D[aniel] W[allace] Culp (Toronto, Canada: J. L. Nichols & Co., 1902).
91 Bragg, “Are Other Than Baptist and Methodist Churches Adapted to the Present Negro,” 356–57.
92 Bragg, “Are Other Than Baptist and Methodist Churches Adapted to the Present Negro,” 358.
93 Bragg, “Are Other Than Baptist and Methodist Churches Adapted to the Present Negro,” 358.
94 Lewis, Yet with a Steady Beat, 29.
95 Turner, Soul Liberty.
96 Lewis, Yet with a Steady Beat.
97 On black writers who interwove religion, race, and nation, see Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, 8–9.
98 Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 238.
99 Moses, Wilson J., Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), xiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
100 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.
101 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, introduction.