The Reverend Jennie Johnson and African Canadian History, 1868–1967 by Nina Reid-Maroney (review)

Nina Reid-Maroney has produced an engaging piece of work on a little-known figure in African–North American history: the Reverend Jennie Johnson. Johnson’s relative anonymity is surprising when you consider that she was the ‘first ordained woman in Canada called as a full-time minister’ (1). Reid-Maroney has written an impressive biography of Johnson spanning the years between 1868 and 1967. The book covers the period from the end of the Underground Railroad to the maelstrom of the civil rights movement in North America, one of the most important periods in modern North American history.

Reid-Maroney presents Johnson not only to recount the story of a singularly exemplary life but also to encourage us ‘to consider the familiar terms in which we often cast the history of nineteenth century black migration and settlement in Canada . . . [and] to recognize the bond between the culture of abolition in the nineteenth century and the movement for racial justice in the twentieth’ (1). Reid-Maroney makes a compelling case for this argument. Indeed, Johnson’s life is the tangible bridge that makes this central claim more than a mere theoretical proposition. The book is organized chronologically over the 100-year span of Johnson’s life. It begins by sketching Johnson’s matrilineal and patrilineal ancestors from New Jersey and Illinois, respectively, and the forces that pushed and pulled them to Canada. Johnson’s life is then fleshed out over the course of her birth and early childhood in Chatham Township, Ontario, along with formative experiences in the abolitionist culture of the era that shaped her early outlook and values. The book then moves to a discussion of her sojourn to the United States for a formal education at Wilberforce Seminary (an opportunity that was not open to Blacks in Canada) and her ordination with the Free Will Baptists. After her ordination, Johnson moved back to Canada, returning to the place of her birth to take up an ordained ministry. The book ends with Johnson’s move to Flint, Michigan.

Several important themes are broached within this time frame. First, using intersectionality as an overarching analytical framework, Reid-Maroney asks us to consider the Black church as a site of resistance to racial inequality and a repository of cultural identity as well as a site that produced gender inequalities in the fight for equality. Second, the book takes up the nascent feminist theology Reverend Johnson developed through her life and work. Third, the book aptly demonstrates the linkages and shared landscapes of African-American and African-Canadian history. Fourth, the book also broaches theoretical questions of race, particularly the malleability of race, racial categorization, and resistance.

Reid-Maroney has crafted an engagingly written book that places Johnson’s unearthed, written autobiography at its centre. This autobiography is contextualized within Black North American historiography and an impressive archival record that reconstructs the local demographic and socio-cultural landscapes Johnson traversed. In this way, The Reverend Jennie Johnson is a thick and well-contextualized biography that strives to tell the reader as much about Johnson’s fascinating interior life as it does about the greater forces that shaped it and the symbiotic relationship between the two.

That Johnson’s life was exemplary there can be little doubt. Nonetheless, there is a tendency for Reid-Maroney to view Johnson not only as exemplary but also as almost saintly. The work is unabashed in its adulation for its subject, tending at times toward hagiography. We have a well-developed sense of Johnson’s many accomplishments, but we learn little about Johnson’s flaws, failures, frailties, or limitations as a human being. These sorts of matters, though sensitive, could have been handled in a manner that still afforded respect to Johnson’s legacy. Reid-Maroney hints at Johnson’s middle-class biases during her time at Flint’s Christian mission, where she had a role in providing...