The Community Became an Almost Civilized and Christian One: John Stewart’s Mission to the Wyandots and Religious Colonialism as African American Racial Uplift

ON SATURDAY MORNING JULY 5, 1911, the Reverend Dr. Edward L. Gilliam, an African American Methodist Episcopal pastor from Columbus, Ohio, led a group of black men, women, and children on a pilgrimage north to Upper Sandusky, Ohio.¹ They went to pay homage to the Reverend John Stewart, who, according to church legend, founded the Methodist Episcopal Home Missionary Movement there a century before. As the pilgrims remembered the story, Reverend Stewart earned his saintly reputation for accomplishing what others had failed to do before him—he was the first to convert a previously “unconvertible” Wyandot community and laid the groundwork for the very first permanent mission of the American Methodist Episcopal Home Missionary Society. For the African American pilgrims for whom antiblack prejudice was a normal part of life in 1911, that Stewart was also African American was even more cause for celebration. To them, Reverend Stewart was a model black citizen and a shining example of the potential benefits of racial uplift ideology—a philosophy and set of tactics to lift African Americans economically, socially, and culturally into fuller U.S. citizenship. African Americans who espoused the tenets of racial uplift ideology advocated for Stewart’s enshrinement in the ever-growing pantheon of successful black professors, ministers, journalists, orators, and writers whose lives, they believed, were the evidence of racial progress and the best arguments for African Americans to be included in full American citizenship.² Stewart was not only a model cleric and citizen according to black uplift leaders, but he also moved outside the world of black and white. Stewart went beyond uplifting the African Americans by extending his work to a Native American community. This showed black peoples’ worth not only within their own communities but also within the greater United States. To the pilgrims, Stewart was also a black agent, an apostle of American civilization. This article argues that in addition to striving toward middle-class respectability and economic independence, turn-of-the-twentieth-century black progressives put forth African American religious colonialism among Native Americans as evidence that black Americans were true Americans and worthy of full U.S. citizenship. In other words, African Americans who converted Native Americans to Christianity—and in Stewart’s case, a Christianity bereft of any Indigenous syncretism or symbolism—were not just model citizens; rather, they were true African American apostles of American civilization.

This story complicates nineteenth-century understandings of African American–Native American relations, and highlights the understudied way black leaders attempted to negotiate their own citizenship in the face of American racism by comparing their own black citizenship to what they called Native American savagery. Over and over again, black leaders who aimed for social and political acceptance espoused middle-class Christian values and denigrated Native Americans for their savagery, anti-Christian practices, and unwillingness to buy into the American dream. These black leaders also belittled Native Americans by claiming to be able to tame them and for not bowing easily to westward expansion. An irony in this narrative is that Stewart’s aggressive push to end Native American religious practices in favor of Protestant Christianity aided white American institutions that oppressed both Native American and African American peoples.³ Despite the larger narrative of white settler-colonialism and antiblack racism, John Stewart gained from his role in the mission: the Methodist Episcopal Church rewarded him with heightened stature in the religious community and with land that was formerly owned by Wyandot people. This article shows how black writers at the turn of the twentieth century fit John Stewart’s story into traditional concepts of racial uplift that prescribed notions of respectability, a striving toward a Christian middle-class ideal, and helping other African Americans enhance their respectability.⁴ This article also illustrates how retellings of Stewart’s story—a story largely off the academic radar—reveal twentieth-century black thought on American colonialism and Indian policy on the North American continent. Counter to contemporary rebukes of U.S. imperialism from leaders...