Fourteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The biblical story of Exodus has played a central role in the imagination of black people in the United States. From political addresses to essays to poems, African Americans have routinely routed their aspirations to move from a condition of bondage to a promised land of freedom through the story of the struggles and sojournings of the Hebrew people. While most criticism on African American uses of the Bible has focused on the appropriation of the Exodus story to ground desires for political freedom within the United States, relatively little attention has been given to the ways African Americans have used the Bible to imagine promised lands outside of the United States. With the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857, some African Americans began to reconsider their pursuit of freedom within the expanding borders of the United States and began to consider emigrating elsewhere. One option for relocation was Haiti, the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. Through a close reading of renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s 1861 article, “A Trip to Hayti” and Episcopal priest James Theodore Holly’s “Thoughts on Hayti” (1859), I outline the ways Haiti was figured as a promised land and a holy site for African Americans living in the tumultuous decade of the 1850s. This conception of Haiti as promised land, I contend, reconfigures the way we understand African American biblical interpretation and the role it plays in the pursuit of freedom.