Fifteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The late 19th century witnessed the ascendancy of multiple African American leaders and intellectuals who were profoundly shaped by their liberal faith, including both Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Some are well-known, including Francis Ellen Watkins Harper and Fannie Barrier Williams, while others are less so, including Maria Baldwin, principal of the Agassiz School in Cambridge, and Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, a Transcendentalist who spoke before the National Negro Convention in Syracuse, NY and published multiple essays in the AME Church’s Christian Recorder. Despite the clear influence of religious liberalism on their intellectual production and activist commitments, scholars of Unitarianism have largely ignored these Black religious liberals and scholars of African American religion have either ignored or downplayed their Unitarian faith. This paper thus has two aims. First, through an analysis of published essays and letters, poems, novels, speeches, and archival sources, it demonstrates the centrality of Unitarian theology and social thought in these Black women’s religious lives and activist commitments, especially Unitarian notions of self-culture and emphasis on the power of the written word. Second, the paper demonstrates the critical importance that Black women played in Unitarian politics during the second half of the 19th century, especially in debates about the denomination’s Christian identity. Black women’s engagement with religious liberalism between the Civil War and World War I presaged a more robust Black presence within the Unitarian and Universalist denominations in the early 20th century and highlights a key, yet understudied, aspect of Black religion and politics in postbellum America.