Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Stay or Go? Allen and African Colonization

Stay or Go? Allen and African Colonization This land [of America] . . . is now our mother country. —Allen in Freedom’s Journal, 1827 Sometime in early March 1814, Richard Allen opened a letter from Paul Cuffee, the celebrated free black merchant and ship captain . “Esteemed friend Richard Allen,” it began, “I hope by this time your [colonization] society has been all regular formed. I met with the people of color at New York. They appeared very zealous for the good cause of Africa and concluded to form themselves into society for the same purpose as that in Philadelphia.” Soon to embark on another voyage to their shared homeland, Cuffee wanted Allen to have “all the information about obtaining liberty for Africa.”1 Cuffee also wanted to make sure that the black preacher still supported the growing cause of African colonization. Although no letter survives from Allen, he was indeed a proponent of Cuffee’s plan. He held colonizationist meetings in his home, spread word of Cuffee’s good work to white and black reformers alike, and expressed hope that African colonization would speed global black redemption. Allen’s embrace of African colonization—and his subsequent support of black-led emigration schemes—does not figure prominently in most biographical treatments.2 More than any other issue, though, colonization /emigration illuminates Allen’s constantly evolving activism—and his developing struggle over black identity and national allegiance. In joining Cuffee’s crusade, Allen undertook one of the most radical experiments of his life: mass emigration of blacks beyond the United States. It was no mere flirtation. After African colonization faded from Allen’s mind, Haitian emigration appeared on the reform horizon. After that 7 183 dream disappeared, Allen considered Canadian resettlement. As he put it in a September 1830 address, “the formation of a settlement in the British province of Upper Canada would be a great advantage to the people color . . . [where] we shall be entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities of other citizens.”3 As his words reveal, the elder Allen doubted the ability of the United States to foster an environment of racial equality. And so, for the last fifteen years of his life, he meditated deeply on black exodus from, rather than black redemption within, the United States. Why would a man synonymous with interracial democracy change course? By examining the prospect of racial justice overseas, Allen publicly testified to his increasingly divided soul. He was an American and not an American, a freeman and not a freeman, a man dedicated to saving America from racial sin and a man in search of a country free from racial sin. He was an African American and African trapped in America . To underscore Allen’s alienation during these years, consider that he never embraced colonization/emigration plans during the late eighteenth century. He had plenty of opportunity to do so, for black as well as white reformers (both in Philadelphia and throughout the North Atlantic world) periodically proposed black resettlement schemes. Allen repudiated them all, believing instead that America could be reformed —that he could reshape American race relations. Yet Allen’s confidence was shaken by the confluence of several events during the early nineteenth century: an intensification of antiblack feelings during the War of 1812, a stalled abolition movement, and white Methodists’ vigorous attempts to grab Bethel Church. By the time Paul Cuffee contacted him, Allen wondered aloud about black destinies in America. The shadow of the legendary St. George’s exodus loomed large in the elder Allen’s racial politics: if American oppression intensified, he began to think, then free blacks must seriously consider mass exodus as a means of achieving racial justice. To modern eyes, black separation appears to be a more familiar form of black nationalism. For Allen and black founders, Cuffee’s colonization plan was only one of several possible responses to rigid racial oppression, and its seemingly orthodox black nationalist foundation did not reject Christianity or Western conceptions of rights and liberties as key parts of a future African republic. It was a very liberal form of black nationalism that Allen considered. And, as a black leader thinking about African Americans’ limited freedoms in the United States, he thought it was a course of action that 184 | Stay or Go? must be examined. Allen confided as much to a white colonizationist in 1817, who recalled that the...