[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Richard S. Newman
New York: New York UP, 2008
368 pp., $23.00 pb
Tobin Miller Shearer
History
UM-Missoula
Richard Allen was not Martin Luther King, Jr. Nor was he Thomas Jefferson. He was, however, an African-American leader in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whose name should be remembered as readily as King's or Jefferson's. Richard S. Newman aims to convince readers of Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers that Allen met and often surpassed the contributions of his contemporaries, both black and white, as a civil rights leader and national founder. Although Newman's assertion that Allen contributed to the early Republic raises productive questions, his argument that Allen "was a forerunner of the most famous black prophetic leader in American history" (298) generates tired comparisons. Unadvisable contrasts notwithstanding, Newman has written a biography worthy of significant scholarly attention and acclaim.
Newman reviews Allen's life in ten well-crafted chapters. Following an introduction that situates Allen as a leading member of the African-American community—i.e., a "black founder"—as well as a patriot committed to the same values as other national founders, Newman discusses Allen's early life in slavery. Despite a paucity of primary material, Newman illuminates Allen's work ethic, religious commitment, and personal tenacity. Newman then establishes Allen's secular and sacred credentials as an itinerant Methodist minister, church founder, and committed Philadelphian. Subsequent chapters explore Allen's role as a civic and religious mediator, founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, wily tactician able to out maneuver white Methodist clergy, and proponent of immigration to Africa, Haiti, and Canada. As the final chapters make evident, Newman views Allen as both a politician and a religious leader who cared as passionately about the future of his three-thousand member congregation as he did about the prospects of free and enslaved African Americans in the early nineteenth century.
Throughout the text, narrative accounts snap with the fresh detail, pathos, and high drama of a well-told story. White Methodist clergy attempt to seize control of Bethel's pulpit only to find their passage blocked by hundreds of indignant congregants. Allen and the leader of a Bethel faction clash amid shouts and spittle. Early AME leaders waffle over whether to ordain Allen as bishop. These and other dramatic encounters allow Newman to highlight Allen's "stubborn" (7) streak.
The biography of a charismatic leader like Allen would prove arresting on plot alone. Newman, however, is not satisfied simply to tell an interesting story. He intends to position Allen in the pantheon of early Republic founders. Thus he describes the "virtual" (24) debate in which Allen refuted Benjamin Franklin's belief that freed slaves needed white oversight to curtail their "natural tendency toward social disruption" (25). Allen's 1799 eulogy of George Washington launches the book itself. Newman likewise lists similarities between Allen and white founders Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams (24, 121) in order to demonstrate that Allen served the nation and the African-American community equally well. To be certain, Allen founded Mother Bethel, became the first black bishop of the AME church, filed the first copyright by a black author (along with Allen's writing partner, organizational collaborator, and friend Absalom Jones), and wrote numerous pamphlets and speeches that defended African-American citizenship claims. Yet he also moved outside the black community as he challenged Franklin's belief in innate black corruption (25), served suffering Philadelphians regardless of color during the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 (88), challenged Thomas Jefferson's fear of emancipation (107), and identified systemic racism as the root cause of African-American suffering (110). Through these accounts, Newman demonstrates how Allen shaped the early Republic by influencing debates about slavery in an emerging democracy.
Newman likewise elucidates Allen's support for emigration strategies. In the face of slavery's spread, a waning abolitionist movement, and increasing segregation and racial subordination in the North, Allen became convinced that African Americans would be denied his success and prosperity. In his later years Allen then began to support emigration efforts to parts of Africa, Haiti, and Canada in turn. Newman precisely explicates the difference between support for Haitian and Liberian colonization. Southern slave owners opposed plans to colonize Haiti because they feared an ascendant ex-slave nation in their region; the same slave owners supported shipping free African-Americans to the far more distant African continent (254). By contrast, Allen aimed to transform "the politics of race in the Atlantic world of the 1820s" (252) by helping to build a black-led nation in a white-dominated hemisphere. Although Newman can only speculate why Allen failed to address emigration in his autobiography, he nonetheless establishes the importance of emigration in Allen's larger body of thought. Other scholars have failed to explain how an unfailing advocate for African-American citizenship could come to support colonization schemes. Newman resolves this apparent contradiction.
Biographies frequently run the risk of morphing into hagiography. At points, Newman follows such a trend. He presents Allen as an incomparably industrious worker, a successful businessman, a loving and generous father, and a protean womanist who supported the ministry of itinerant African-American preacher Jarena Lee. The evidence presented suggests that this multi-talented, charismatic preacher filled these many roles. Nevertheless, I was relieved also to encounter discussions of Allen's role in precipitating the Wesley schism within Bethel, the challenges younger ministers presented to Allen, and opposition within his own congregation to colonization proposals. The narrative would have been strengthened by even more rigorous evaluation of Allen's shortcomings. Newman's description of Allen as "stubborn" (7) suggests that there may have been alternate perspectives about someone known for autocratic and obstinate behavior. To avoid hagiography, historical figures need careful but unflinching evaluation. Overall, Newman succeeds here as well.
Throughout his text, Newman places Allen in a larger historical context. He analyzes Allen's and Jones's Yellow Fever pamphlet in light of the tropes and dialectical conventions of the late eighteenth century (119). When identifying how Allen communicated goals, structured a new denomination, and travelled throughout the Republic, Newman shows that Allen and his contemporaries availed themselves of the most modern techniques (129). When describing the exorbitant sums paid by Allen to buy back his own church property, Newman assesses them according to period measures (166). The author has clearly immersed himself in the politics, society, and culture of Allen's milieu. Freedom's Prophet is no parochial tale; the story informs readers of the man and the man's time.
Despite providing such rich context, Newman employs a fundamentally anachronistic and outdated tool to establish Allen's ultimate significance. Rather than compare Allen to his contemporaries alone, Newman reaches beyond time to position Allen next to other charismatic African-American leaders. He notes, for example, that under Allen's leadership the Bethel congregation "realized years before Northern militants like David Walker that mass action among free people of color—not merely slaves—could be an effective strategy of social dissent" (170). Here, Newman brings Allen and his congregation into conversation with a near historical contemporary. Further in the book, however, he compares Allen to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, reconstruction-era black nationalist Martin R. Delany, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nation of Islam spokesperson Malcolm X (273). To be certain, Newman appropriately interprets Allen's influence on luminaries such as politician Jesse Jackson, author Ralph Ellison, and author James Baldwin (295-296). Yet he stretches too far when he attempts to establish Allen's significance through comparison with Martin Luther King, Jr. (26, 298). As historians have argued for some time, we do not need King to understand the civil rights movement. In the same way, we do not need King to understand Richard Allen. Allen stands on his own as a stirring example of, as Newman himself contends, a "black prophetic leader" (297).
The tendency to introduce anachronistic terms and comparisons shows up elsewhere in the text. Newman frames portions of Allen's writings as "liberation theology," a term that did not exist at the time Allen wrote. Although the author demonstrates that Allen believed "God sided with oppressed people" (9), to claim that he helped "define the meaning of liberation theology" (9) takes Allen's writing out of one specific historical context and attempts to place it in another. Those who articulated liberation theology as a body of thought and deliberate reflection would not emerge for more than a century. Likewise, Newman notes that Allen sounded "refreshingly modern" when he rebutted physician Benjamin Rush's notions of black cultural and physical inferiority (110). Although forward in his thinking, Allen also echoed his contemporaries who held similar views about the innate ability and normalcy of African Americans. Historian Winthrop D. Jordan has documented early nineteenth century white authors such as Dr. Hugh Williamson who, like Allen, held that environmental factors trumped disease or biological makeup in explaining the African-American condition (Jordan 1968, 539-541). Mia Bay also asserts that many African Americans in the nineteenth century "remained preoccupied with the ethnological defense of the Negro" (Bay 2000, 102). Allen's thought resonated with other thinkers of his day. Less a modern man outside his time, he conversed with contemporaries in his period and led them forward.
Reviewers need to point to such inconsistencies. Yet reviewers also need to put such inerrancies in perspective. In the case of Freedom's Prophet, the tendency to establish significance through contemporary comparison at most wrinkles an otherwise even text. Indeed, such comparisons can help contemporary readers make sense of the past. Although I contend we need to interpret the past on its own terms and thereby avoid such anachronistic contrasts, the interpretive impulse remains essential. Most importantly, the comparisons do not get in the way of Newman's central argument that Richard Allen was a prophetic leader of his generation.
In addition to positioning Allen well among his contemporaries, Newman also navigates several historical fault lines with nuance and precision. For example, Newman plunges into the debate over the date of Allen's departure from St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church. Historians had long accepted Allen's claim that he, Jones, and other African-American members had been ejected in 1787 for praying in a newly designated whites-only section of St. George's sanctuary. More recent scholarship suggests that the forced departure took place five years later in 1792 or 1793. Newman explains that the timing of the rupture makes a difference in our understanding of whether Allen and his contemporaries left because their white co-religionists forced them out—in the case of the earlier date—or because they chose to leave on their terms—in the case of the latter. In addition to assessing relevant literature and a piece of illuminating primary documentation on this question, Newman concludes that Allen viewed the period from first consideration of departure through to the actual walk-out as "one great episode" (68). Although his subsequent proposal that Allen arranged the walkout to "reinvigorate blacks, put whites on the defensive, and make Allen himself appear to be the visionary that he was" (68) remains speculative, the analysis offers a potential resolution to an unresolved debate. Newman's analysis of Allen's failure to elucidate his colonization plans in his most public writings likewise offers a plausible explanation for an otherwise mysterious lacuna.
Freedom's Prophet in the end offers a trenchant and convincing portrayal of a figure who has earned a place among founders of a black "nation within a nation" (77) and the United States as a whole. He stands on his own without need of comparison to any twentieth century figure no matter how well known or charismatic. Richard Allen was Richard Allen. Ironically, given the strength of his book, Newman may soon find that the object of his biography has become the measuring point against whom other historical figures will in the future find their measure.
[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]