Emanuel AME Church: Christianity as resistance

This chapter examines the ways the ancestral memory of Civil War service by such groups as the Sons of Confederate Veterans became hotly contested in the second decade of the 21st Century. What for some southerners was personal heritage, particularly as represented in the Confederate Battle Flag, was for many others a symbol of slavery and a continued belief in white supremacy. Matters came to a head in the killing of nine parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church during a Bible study. Yet the deeper issues of reverence or revulsion for the southern past continued with religion and religious leaders playing key parts.

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Making Madam C. J. Walker

Madam C. J. Walker's Gospel of Giving ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252043451.003.0002 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 25-54

Author(s):

Tyrone McKinley Freeman

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Early Life ◽

Moral Imagination ◽

African Methodist Episcopal ◽

Black History ◽

Methodist Episcopal ◽

Racial Uplift ◽

Self Help ◽

Ame Church

Chapter 1 presents the early life experiences of Sarah Breedlove and their influences in shaping Madam C. J. Walker’s identity, sense of responsibility to others, and philanthropic giving. Her philanthropy began to form when she was a poor, widowed migrant moving around the South dependent upon a robust philanthropic network of black civil society institutions and black women who cared for her during the most difficult period of her life. The chapter shows how she was socialized into respectability, racial uplift ideology, generosity, and philanthropic giving by a group of St. Louis black churchwomen and clubwomen, whose support and mentoring enabled her to change her life course. In outlining her early membership and involvement with key networks of women, including washerwomen, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s Mite Missionary Society, and the Court of Calanthe fraternal order, the chapter demonstrates the formation of Madam Walker’s moral imagination as the foundation for her philanthropic life. It situates Walker within the culture of the AME Church, which immersed her in faith, black history, self-help and racial uplift ideologies, education, activism, and internationalism. In the process, the chapter reveals Walker’s formation of a moral imagination that integrated business and philanthropy, embraced particular causes, and forged diverse means of giving.

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