Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War (review)

268civil war history Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War. By David E. Swift. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Pp. xviii, 384. $35.00.) David E. Swift's overarching concerns are the general history of the "Afro-American freedom movement" and, most especially, the "critical importance" of religion in motivating and directing that movement from its origins to the present. In Black Prophets of Justice, he presents a painstakingly researched and meticulously written examination of an admittedly small, but, to him, precedent-setting piece of that history. In the interlocking public careers of six antebellum black Presbyterian and Congregational clergymen—Samuel Cornish (1795-1858), Theodore Wright (1797-1847), James W. C. Pennington (1807-70), Charles B. Ray (1807-86), Amos Gerry Beman (1812-74), and Henry Highland Garnet (1815-81)—Swift sees a series of institutional innovations and a "melding of religious life and social protest" that helped stamp the ongoing freedom movement with some of its most characteristic and enduring features. Swift's intentions are not primarily biographical. Though he provides telling, if spare, characterizations of all six figures and writes at times quite movingly about the often trying circumstances of their individual lives, his interest clearly lies far more in their public than in their private struggles. It is also their collective contributions, not their individual careers, that define the book and give it its shape. Though most of its main chapters are dominated by only one or two figures, Black Prophets of Justice is not a series of discrete biographical essays, but a continuous narrative in which the six central players move on and off center stage depending on their public role at the time and place under consideration. It is their "unique group achievement" in launching and carrying forward "a creative process" resulting in "black Presbyterian and Congregational churches, black newspapers, black vigilance committees, . . . large-scale petition campaigns, and politically oriented statewide black conventions" that Swift narrates, analyzes, and celebrates. And it is, more particularly, their antebellum accomplishments he means to record. Though all but Cornish and Wright lived into and past the Civil War years, Swift's detailed narrative ends in 1860, with their "closing years" quickly sketched in a short final chapter. Why these six—and is their collective achievement truly "unique"? Swift's definition of his subject is in part explicitly denominational. Black Presbyterians and Congregationalists are of special interest, he claims, because as spiritual descendants of the Puritans they "were more likely to be systematic workers for radical social reform than were black clergy of the other denominations." But this book is not an exercise in denominational church history. By 1860, Swift reports, there were twenty or thirty black Presbyterian and Congregational ministers, but many, if BOOK REVIEWS269 not most, of them go entirely unmentioned. (The closest thing to an inclusive listing appears only in a footnote, on page 310.) He focuses instead almost exclusively on the six figures he sees as "unique in their time for the degree and consistency of their social activism and for the new Afro-American institutions they took the lead in forming." More implicitly, the book is also defined geographically. New York City— along with its upstate and Connecticut hinterlands—is the terrain on which Swift's story unfolds. The city's oldest black Presbyterian church— known at various times as First Colored, Prince Street, and Shiloh Presbyterian—provides a kind of axis mundi, for it was founded by Cornish and then successively pastured by Wright, Pennington, and Garnet. Swift is little inclined, however, to pursue geographical links across denominational lines. Such important black clergy activists as New York Episcopal priest Peter Williams, Jr., and upstate AME Zion pastor Jermain W. Loguen receive little attention. Swift is so tenacious in recording the multiple roles these six men played as presidents, secretaries, spokespersons, and publicists for a quite remarkable array of protest and self-help organizations and so resourceful in documenting the intricate web of connections that bound their public lives together that he gradually wears down one's resistance to his claims about their coherence and importance as a group. In the end, however, one still suspects he is too dismissive...