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Chapter 1 Public Protest and the Emergent Black Religious Press Print culture had been central to the AME tradition from as early as 1794, when Absalom Jones and Richard Allen produced a pamphlet to challenge misrepresentations of black Philadelphians during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Matthew Carey, a well-known printer, claimed publicly in his own pamphlet that African Americans had taken advantage of the outbreak by burglarizing the homes of whites who had left the contaminated city. In the absence of a response by the white press, Jones and Allen published A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia. Setting the tone for subsequent African American authors, Jones and Allen felt it was critical to correct the public record as quickly as possible to avert further fallout from the slanderous assertion. Prior to the formation of an established black press, Allen and Jones were one of many African Americans that utilized the pamphlet format to protest racial and social injustice in America. Addressing issues such as abolition, education, socioeconomic status, and a wide range of other moral and religious concerns, a vast number of pamphlets flooded the early-nineteenthcentury discourse. Usually printed as thin brochures, the pamphlets were meant to reach a diverse audience, from sympathetic whites to literate black communities across the country, who might aid their cause. Calls for action and minutes from important events and meetings were also published in hopes of catalyzing movements for social change.1 While regularly categorized as distinctive genres, many of the writers and supporters of protest pamphlets were instrumental in the creation of denominational newspapers and periodicals to disseminate information, assert their civil rights, and engage in public debate about the best future course for the black community. 2 Public Protest and the Emergent Black Religious Press The black press would embrace the stylistic and rhetorical devices of the early pamphleteers to transform the protest tradition after the Civil War. Not only did they challenge Carey’s characterization in their pamphlet, but Jones and Allen described the ways blacks had, at risk to their own health, helped a substantial number of white citizens during the crisis. They detailed the heroic efforts of African Americans who responded to the call to help white residents of Philadelphia with only a vague assurance “that people of our colour were not liable to take the infection.” They described how black responders, far from acting in a chaotic manner, consulted with city officials such as the mayor to determine the most prudent course of action . Many African Americans rendered aid without consideration of the steep cost to their own financial and personal well-being. While acknowledging that some misconduct did take place, they assured their readers that “there were as many white as black people, detected in pilfering.”2 Even further, they made a larger argument that boldly asserted that the presence of African Americans was not the problem; rather, it was the institution of slavery that denied blacks from reaching their full potential that ultimately led to immoral behavior when it occurred. To demonstrate their claim, Jones and Allen called for an educational “experiment”: “We believe if you would try the experiment of taking a few black children, and cultivate their minds with the same care, and let them have the same prospect in view, as to living in the world, as you would wish for your own children, you would find them upon the trial, they were not inferior in mental endowments .”3 This equal playing field coupled with the abolition of slavery, they argued, would demonstrate the true intellectual prowess of the African American race. Continuing this protest tradition, sixteen years later, Daniel Coker, on the national stage, prophesied about the importance of an autonomous black church and clergy as “a biblical embodiment of the cultural and religious transformation of enslaved Africans into free Afro-Americans” in his pamphlet A Dialogue between a Virginian and an African Minister (1810). In the face of charges that blacks were an “unredeemable” and “uncivilized” people, Coker asserted that African Americans were a “chosen generation,” a “royal priesthood,” a “holy nation,” and a “peculiar people” selected for a unique divine charge.4 Scholars have heralded Coker’s writings as the most literary of the early protest pamphlets. In particular, historian and literary critic Dorothy Porter characterized the work as a “scholastic dialogue.” Coker’s pamphlet was one of the few written and published in the slaveholding South...

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