Anti-Commodified Black Studies and the Radical Roots of Black Christian Education

In the academy, the Black poor and working class are often called “ordinary folks.” “Ordinary,” however, suggests that there is an extraordinary caliber of Black people who surpass the supposedly “limited” capacities of the Black working class. To say “ordinary folks” obscures the consequences of capitalism in Black communities. It is a deflection of how upper- and middle-class Black people situate themselves above and over those who are described as every day and ordinary, or who are imagined as “unruly” and deserving of anti-black violence Indeed, “ordinary” lacks critical specificity of the ways power, class, and proximity to whiteness emerges in Black. Manning Marable called it “Black Capitalism,” fostered by “a politically conservative sector of the Black elite. Yet, the Black elite also has factions that claim progressivity and radicalism, even as their appeals to the extraordinary contradict their affinities to problack movements. It is important to note that Black Studies, however, was not founded to aid the elite held up in the ivory tower, but to dismantle systems of domination beleaguering the poorest and most vulnerable among us In 1969, June Jordan admonished us, “[The university] is where the people become usable parts of the whole machine. Machine is not community. But many Black scholars have mistaken being “usable parts” of the university for wholeness, and have devastatingly settled for publish or perish, step over your sister, push your brother, kill yourself.

In the spirit of Black queer and feminist refusal, I reject the scholastic impulse to use the moniker “ordinary folks.” Such a refusal is a critique of the university’s infatuation with racial uplift as class ascension, and in building on Joy James’ notion of “transcending the talented tenth,” I instead use what I term, “Black working class practitioners of Black Studies. Because Black scholars so often “chase [ … ] fantastic notions” of power, this article also takes seriously Hortense Spillers’ observation that we need to “look at what has happened to community. If community is not machine and the machine is the university, as Jordan reminds us, then community exists among those who exist beyond the university’s commodification. With this in mind, what are contemporary scholars of Black Studies to do with what we have inherited from our Black Studies forebears, especially as neoliberalism and corporate university interests (mis)guide our collective ruminations on justice and Black liberation? To attempt to answer this query, I turn to Black working-class practitioners of Black Studies, like Black women Christian educators from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, who model for contemporary Black academics how to betray the commodification of knowledge production, which causes the delegitimization of the intellectualisms of “the least of these.”

It is important to note, however, that I do not wish to haphazardly dichotomize Black working class practitioners and Black scholars in the academy, given the numbers of adjunct faculty, for instance, who have been called “the new working poor” due to horrible working conditions and unlivable salaries. Rather, I name the ways tenure, class, and institutional affiliations impact how Black scholars, especially at elite universities, regard the working class and the poor outside of the university space and arguably within (adjuncts, service workers, hourly-waged employees, etc.). It is also necessary to distinguish between the Black public intellectual as commodity and the Black scholar who works in the service of multiple Black publics, some of which have historically existed behind “the veil.

This article, then, focuses on Black working-class practitioners of Black Studies in African American Protestant churches, specifically two understudied Black women Christian educators from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Catherine (Katy) Ferguson (1774-1854) and Emily Christmas Kinch (1879-1932) These women utilized the African American Protestant Sunday School classroom to wrestle with racialized, classed, and gendered politics both within their respective denominations and outside of them, and they both offer a model of anti-commodified Black Studies, or what I define as grassroots educational institution-building and pedagogical innovation that democratizes the spread and reach of new knowledges for all people. In this way, this article contends with the intellectual inheritances bequeathed to contemporary scholars of African American religions—such as historians, theologians, and ethicists—from Black women Christian educators. It not only situates African American Protestant educational spaces as sites of revolutionary politics and intellectual transformation, but also as catalysts for radical imagination.

Using the religious histories of Ferguson and Kinch in African American Protestant contexts, this article critically thinks about the state of Black Studies as a field By narrating the work and wisdoms of these two understudied Black women religious actors, we come away with a more robust understanding of how to move from theory to praxis, and in the words of historian Ula Taylor, “[we might] marvel at how active those notable radical women were in managing to construct a public image that forced others to see them as progressive agents in the making of history. For the actors in Taylor’s work, Sojourner Truth and Charlotta Bass, the “public” referred to national politics and public speaking. For Ferguson and Kinch, the “public” referred to developing Sunday school curriculum, writing in newspapers, performing charitable works, and traveling throughout the African diaspora. To be clear, these women were not “black intellectual performers,” who as black feminist political theorist Joy James has observed, “[are] routinely applauded in academic halls and on talk show stages for [their] sagacity,” even as “market incentives for experts on blackness encourage the reification of black intellectuals as cultural performers, predictably as financial or career considerations mute radical analyses of antidemocratic, racialist and sometimes violent state practices. Rather, Ferguson and Kinch did anticommodified Black Studies in public through the space of their respective African American Protestant denominations, even if they did not call it such, not for profit but for the sustainability of their communities. While it is easier to write off these women as having nothing to offer us today given their Christian social conservatism, studying their complexities brings to the surface our own inconsistencies as Black scholars.

Catherine (Katy) Ferguson and the New York City Sunday School Movement

In 1793, Catherine (Katy) Ferguson, an ex-slave in New York whose freedom was purchased for $200, established the first documented Sunday school in the United States—the hub of her anti-commodified Black Studies. Sunday schools in African American religious communities have traditionally been sites of communal learning for children and leadership for Black women barred from preaching in historically Black denominations Historian Bettye Collier-Thomas has observed, “Sunday schools were formed in many of the early all-black churches established by Methodists at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These schools were the chief avenues for transmitting knowledge of the Bible and teaching reading and writing. A Presbyterian, Ferguson was among an earlier cadre of black women religious actors who used their faith to respond to widespread non-literacy among the enslaved and free black population of the antebellum period, specifically in the late eighteenth century. Collier-Thomas maintains, “Following the death of her husband and two children, [Ferguson] took an interest in the many poor black and white children who lived in her neighborhood [ … ] Gathering up a number of poor orphans, almost half of whom were white, she opened an integrated Sunday school in her home. She taught the children the scriptures and, where possible, found homes for them. News of Ferguson’s Sunday school spread widely. Not only did she use her home to foster interracial Christian education, but she also challenged the systemic displacement of poor and working-class children across the color line in the early United States. Given her charitable efforts and her influence as a Sunday school teacher, by 1821, the New-York Spectator listed Ferguson as a leader of the New York Female Bible Society of People of Color, as part of the nationwide American Bible Society

Ferguson opened the doors of her home to black and white poor and homeless children in post-Revolutionary New York, many of whom were European immigrants or the children of ex-slaves. In his obituary for Ferguson, New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan wrote, “During her life, she had taken forty-eight children— twenty of them white children—some from the alms-house and others from their parents, and brought them up, or kept them till she could find places for them. She expended much money on their behalf and followed them with affectionate interest with her prayers. To my inquiry, “Have you laid up any property?” she quickly replied, “How could I, when I gave away all I earned?” Later he wrote, “When she lived at 51 Warren street [ … ] she regularly collected the children in the neighborhood, who were accustomed to run in the street on the Lord’s day, into her house, and got suitable persons to come and hear them say their catechism, etc. This practice marked the beginning of her Sunday school. Ferguson brought white and black children into her home from the streets and taught them scripture in order to protect them from danger. She was quoted as saying, “The ruination of both white and colored people, in this city, is gambling. I told one of them, that I would never do it; that I had rather live on bread and water. In the eyes of this Black Presbyterian woman, crime and poverty were urban realities that should not have kept children from safe housing and education. Her Sunday school was a philanthropic effort even as she came from humble beginnings and lacked the financial stability to fully support many of the children she housed, taught, and spiritually fed.

While the racial and class politics of Ferguson’s school are significant, it is also critical to think about the role of her home in the cultivation of the institution of Sunday school as an expression of anti-commodified Black Studies. Historian John Giggie has contended in his book on the post-Reconstruction Delta, “The black Christian home was an extension of the church, a place on whose walls hung images of black heroes and icons of African American Protestantism and whose inhabitants dressed tidily and patterned their behavior after the life of Jesus. An idealized setting that theoretically nurtured the manners and morality of all who lived there. Ferguson did not preach from a pulpit or seek public recognition of her spiritual and philanthropic educational efforts, but she utilized the space of her black Christian home to practice an anti-commodified Black Studies—free to all, especially the poor, white or black—that galvanized the city’s youth in grassroots fashion. Reflecting on Ferguson’s life as an educator raises several critical questions: What does it mean to do Black Studies within the home? How does the home engender safe space for insurgent and revolutionary thinking? In what ways does the home—the Black home—counter the neoliberal, self-aggrandizing, and competitive logics of the white capitalist imperial university? Moreover, what does it mean for white people to “do” Black Studies? Is such a project possible? What is the relationship between Black Studies and the white scholar?

Thinking about Ferguson’s work as a Black Studies inheritance also prompts further consideration of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s words from the twenty-first century, “The university is a site for resistance, certainly. But it ain’t home. You know, [W.E.B.] Du Bois wasn’t home nowhere. Home—or the site(s) where marginal subjects are free and free to be—contrasts with striking significance to the anti-Black, white supremacist machinations of the university space where Blackness is sterilized and disciplined and where whiteness and anti-blackness is taught, practiced, and regularly celebrated. Indeed, Black scholars who navigate, if not sojourn, academe are charged to resist the illusion of home sequestered in ivory towers and degrees sealed with ancestors’ blood. Home and university are not synonymous. To love the university, one must forget home. To love home, one must resist the university Ferguson, who never entered the university, did the work of Black Studies in her home: a noteworthy feat amidst the university’s burgeoning slaveocracy Ferguson was also non-literate, and yet she still taught— without letters, but with much determination.

Without question, Ferguson’s labor was not in vain. In an 1851 editorial correspondence included in The Christian Times, an anonymous commentator reflected on the growth of the Sunday school movement in the North amidst the anniversary of the American and Foreign Christian Union, an organization founded in New York City in May 1849 with the expressed mission of converting Roman Catholics to Protestantism. “On Tuesday the streets were long crowded by lines of Sabbath School children, proceeding down to Castle Garden and some to Tripler Hall: and I have not yet heard, what I dreaded, of serious injured on the way.” The writer continued, “I saw a lady this morning who had a class in one of the first Sabbath Schools ever taught in this city; and I believe Katy Ferguson, the old colored woman who set the first in operation, (though she could not read herself,), is still alive. What a current of blessings has since flowed through the land in that channel. Three years later, in 1854, when Ferguson died of cholera, The New York Times publicized her passing So too did the Christian Register boldly declare that “her biography ought to be written, to go with that of ‘Toussaint’” and the New York Recorder commented, “The departure of this remarkable woman should be commemorated by an obituary notice worthy of such a mother in Israel and such an active, life-long Christian philanthropist. It is hoped that a memoir will be presented to the public.

Months before her death, The New-York Observer included an excerpt from Far Off; Or, Africa and America Described, a book by British evangelist Favell Lee Mortimer, “The first Sabbath-School in New-York assembled in Kate’s house, and a prayer-meeting has been held there every week for forty years. Many white strangers, from distant lands, have attended that prayer-meeting, and have been welcomed with all the warmth of her African nature, and of her Christian heart. Despite the racist undertones of Mortimer’s eulogy characteristic of European Evangelicals, it is striking, however, that Mortimer included several pages about Ferguson’s Sabbath school and her commitment to the poor—both black and white—in a book project that attempted to chronicle the history of African descended people on the continent of Africa and in the Americas. Indeed, Ferguson was known by religious actors and educators in the United States and abroad. Before her passing, the New-York Recorder reported that she was greeted by “a company of missionaries [who] were about to embark for West Africa, under the direction of the American Missionary Association. One of the missionaries was invited to attend the little meetings held at Ferguson’s house, and did so once or twice before leaving the country. Although Christian missionary efforts were historically informed by colonialization, slavery, and the demonization of Africana religions, Black Sunday school teachers like Katy Ferguson, and missionaries like those who visited with her, saw themselves as “uplifting the race” through evangelism and missionary work

In the decades following Ferguson’s death, many reflected on her life. In 1915 the Baltimore Afro-American published, “Catherine Ferguson, ex-slave it was, whose anguish at parting with her mother taught her to sympathize with all desolate children, and these became the care of her life. [On] Sundays, she was in the habit of collecting the children in the neighborhood, white and black, at her humble dwelling on Warren Street, to be instructed in things religious by herself. In 1923, a Mrs. John W. Olcott called to mind “[Katy’s] peaceful countenance shining because of her loving spirit” and “her scholars [being] many poor white children. In 1986, Black Detroit residents founded the Catherine Ferguson Academy for pregnant girls and teenage moms in honor of Ferguson’s dedication to troubled youth. The founders and teachers, primarily Black women, described themselves as working in the lineage of Ferguson up until the school’s closure in 2014 due to failing enrollment and financial difficulties.

Despite Ferguson’s influence and reach, she did not conceive of how the Sunday school movement would evolve to incorporate the Ethiopianism, PanAfricanism, and black nationalism that developed in the Christian education and political organizing of Emily Christmas Kinch in the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, the Sunday school and charity work that Ferguson did in New York from the late eighteenth century to 1854 when she died paved the way for the work of Kinch, an African American woman born in Orange, New Jersey around 1879, an hour or so away from where Ferguson took her last breath.

Emily Christmas Kinch, Teacher of the “Redemption of Africa”

While serving the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Monrovia, Liberia as a missionary, thirty-year-old Emily Christmas Kinch founded the Eliza Turner Memorial School on February 1, 1909 There, she and other instructors taught children history, Bible study, and how to embody what Imani Perry has described as “Black formalism,” or “ritual practices with embedded norms, codes of conduct, and routine, dignified ways of doing and being,” such as oratory, homiletics, and traditional songs. Perry contends that such practices were “in its symbolic meaning, an articulation and expression of grace and identity that existed in refuge from the violence of white supremacy. Indeed, African American Christian educators like Kinch were disinterested in preparing African American and Liberian children to assimilate into the white, European world. Rather, her intentions to “uplift” them, particularly Liberian women and girls, was part of a larger political imperative to reform and redevelop West African communities and persons ravished by colonialism. Kinch believed, “We can reach our highest attainment, only in so far as we stoop to reach the man beneath us. She articulated much of the philanthropic and self-help rhetoric which circulated in the AME church and in other predominately Black denominations Her notion of “stooping to reach the man beneath us” also aligned with Christian benevolence and paternalism, which was often propagated by evangelists and missionaries in the early United States. To help those in need, in Kinch’s estimation, was a profession of her Christian faith.

In her 1917 pamphlet West Africa: An Open Door, Kinch also argued that those same Liberian women and girls were in desperate need of, not only literacy, but of Christianization. “The Church has never had a greater or more difficult task ahead of it than the one which it now confronts. The African woman is calling for Christian education, and unless we give it to her under the patronage of the Christian religion she will seek and find it in some of the non-Christian religious, and she will be lost to the Christian Church. Here, Kinch expressed deeply problematic and Christian supremacist descriptions of “the African.” In later passages, she mischaracterized West African religions as merely “witchcraft” and named “witch doctors” demonic. She also denounced West African practices of polygamy and cultural institutions such as the Bundu or Gree-Gree Bush, offering Black American respectability and Victorian sexual morality as alternatives. In this way, her notion of Black Christian education was fraught. Even still, Kinch saw Sierra Leone and Liberia as places where African women and girls could be “uplifted” through the world of words and scripture. “There can be no real uplift until the womanhood of Africa has been quickened into spiritual life. And as a stream cannot rise above its source, so a race cannot rise above its women.” She continued, “On this principle can the redemption of Africa be assured. It can therefore be readily seen that schools especially for girls are a same kind of education that has made them the controlling force in the world.

Kinch’s reasoning for Christian education was replete with colonial undertones, especially her suggestion that “the Christian school can supplant the Bundu or GreeGree Bush, and the Porroh or Devil Society.” Speaking from her own experiences as founder and a teacher in the Eliza Turner Memorial School since 1909, she asked, “Is it worthwhile [to uplift the women of Africa]?” To which she responded, “Tremendously worthwhile [… ] There is an open door. Over its portals is written the word Opportunity. Kinch reflected, “It has proven a helpful agency along educational lines, beyond our most sanguine expectations. In the operation of this school at Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, the church answered the demand of a long-felt need of her membership. Kinch saw the school as “God’s plan that Africa should be taken at once for Him; for everywhere the appeal comes, the awakening is apparent. She also described her students as “[coming] from heathen homes; the majority [of which] have never heard of the true God.

Although Kinch’s internalized anti-Africanness, specifically her disdain for “heathen and ancestral worship,” permeated her discussion of the Eliza Turner Memorial School, she nonetheless used the school to teach children literacy. “The children delight to come to the Sunday school,” she noted. “They love to hear the stories, learn the songs. So long before the hour of opening these dear little folks can be seen eagerly hurrying along the narrow paths en route to the Sunday school. Oh, it is inspiring, almost entrancing to note the eagerness and attentiveness depicted in their faces, their clear eyes shining with interest, which deepens more and more as the Bible story is told in plain and simple language.

By 1920, Kinch’s characterization of Africa had drastically shifted. Her participation in the meetings of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) were instrumental in her new conception of Black Christian education in Africa. Africa was no longer “shut out from civilization through no fault of her own” in need of the Christian Church as she exclaimed in 1917. Rather “Africa never was in a more susceptible, receptable mood for the UNIA” and echoing UNIA founder Marcus Mosiah Garvey, “[Africans] looked [then] to the American Negro and to the men and women of [the UNIA] for redemption. For Kinch, Sunday school in Liberia and her missionary efforts in West Africa were initially for the purpose of Christianization and racial uplift. As she was radicalized by Garvey and the women of the UNIA, her school became a site for the cultivation of Black nationalism

In a speech delivered in Liberty Hall on June 20, 1920 before a crowd of UNIA members, Kinch sang the praises of a fertile Liberia. Drawing from the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible, she declared, “There is a land that flows with milk and honey. There is a land that would receive you gladly—a land that you have turned your back on, a land to which men have gone over and come back bringing the joyful tidings that we are fully able to go up and possess the land. Decrying lynching and Jim Crow in the United States, Kinch boasted about “the resources of Africa,” such that “There is enough mahogany burned in Liberia alone to furnish every family in the United States with three pieces of furniture.” A fiery preacher, she asked, “Why not come back to Africa and make this a great country for ourselves, our children and our children’s children

Without question, Kinch was a Black nationalist woman who esteemed Garvey. In another part of her speech, which was later published in the UNIA’s Negro World on June 26, 1920, Kinch stated, “I was speaking to a friend of mine who has recently returned from her first trip abroad, and she told me that in Sierra Leone every other man was changing his name to Marcus Garvey [ … ] And if the men of Africa have been so enthused and have caught the spirit of this man whom they have never seen, what about the men and women who are privileged with contact with this man of vision? Kinch’s deep admiration for Garvey, however, was not the only source of her radical vision for Black Christian education. In this way, the term “Garveyite” does not adequately depict the sum of her political maturation. As historian Keisha Blain has argued, “the term “Garveyite [ … ] reinforces the ideological ties to Garvey yet does not account for the diverse political and religious traditions on which black nationalist women drew. Kinch had been acquainted with African redemptionist rhetoric long before her engagement with Garvey and the UNIA, though it was her direct engagement with the UNIA that caused such sentiments to materialize. Indeed, it is important to note that Kinch was reared and held leadership positions in the AME church, the first independent denomination founded by Africans in the Americas in 1816, with its own Black nationalist sensibilities. She was the daughter of an AME pastor and was the only AME delegate to the International Sunday School Convention held in Toronto, Canada in 1905. Before serving as a missionary in West Africa from 1908 to 1910, she also served as president of the New Jersey Conference Sunday School Institute of the AME Church for three years, having graduated from the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. In other words, Kinch was shaped by her involvement and leadership in the racially informed and African-centered Sunday School of the AME church where, as Julian H. Bailey has rightly observed, African emigration was explicitly theologized and openly discussed Undeniably, the AME Church nurtured her vision for the liberation of Africans and African Americans, and UNIA meetings in New Jersey and New York further enriched her desire for African redemption. According to historian Randall K. Burkett, Kinch was one of “the one hundred twenty-two men and women who on August 20, 1920 signed the ‘Declaration of Rights’ which was the charter document of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Bearing these things in mind, one can read the didactic intent of Kinch’s Liberty Hall speech. She stated in her conclusion, “Black skins or short hair, money or no money, you are a man and have the opportunity of being the greatest person in that republic; for the only requirement of Liberia is that you are black. Let us therefore join hands and back up the man (Garvey) who is leading us out of this wilderness into the Promised Land.

Kinch, the Sunday school teacher and AME missionary, guided her pupils into the fold of African redemption, just as the teachings of the UNIA had expanded her vision for Black Christian education. Her school embodied the diasporic spirit of African American religions. As Edward Curtis IV and Sylvester Johnson have recently argued, “American-born religionists have fashioned theologies, ethics, rituals, and esthetics that shape their sense of racial belonging and trans/national identity. However, this sense of “racial belonging and trans/ national identity,” for Black American missionaries like Kinch, was at times informed by a deeply paternalistic Christian theology and a conflicting antiAfrican sentiment. Indeed, Kinch’s contradictions are an example of how U.S. centric Black Studies, even as it is anti-commodified and outside of the university context, can still reify the presumptions inherent to the white capitalist imperial university, which demonizes non-Western Black subjectivities, while usurping resources and romanticizing certain aspects of non-Western Black culture. This is readily apparent in Kinch’s investments in Liberia as a site befitting “redemption” by “the American Negro and the men and women of [the UNIA]. Garvey, one of her inspirations, expressed a similar sentiment in 1921: “We have come to the conclusion that speedily there must be an emancipated Negro race everywhere; and ongoing back to our respective homes we go with our determination to lay down, if needs be, the last drop of our blood for the defense of Africa and for the emancipation of our race. The UNIA and other Black nationalist organizations saw themselves as bringing redemption to other parts of the world—usually from the West to non-Western countries populated by “negroes.

Unlike Garvey, Kinch forged community and managed to spread her influence in Liberia, with the interests of children in central focus. Indeed, “she loved children,” and so those words were inscribed on her tombstone in Rosedale Cemetery in Orange, New Jersey. Her love for the youth, specifically, her commitment to growing and evolving her pedagogical approach was a form of anti-commodified Black Studies. In the months before she died on May 15, 1933, she continued to teach her students in the United States and in Liberia using her experiences in the UNIA to expand her Christian theology and practice. The Pittsburgh Courier observed in August 1932 that at the 36th Annual Session of the AME Women’s Missionary, “Mrs. Emily Kinch gave a splendid address to the young people, who rendered the program for the day. That same year, Kinch gave a lecture entitled “The Contributions of Negro Women to American Society” before a Cleveland, Ohio convention of over 1,000 AME members, which included the church’s youth Kinch’s ability to galvanize the young people of the AME church mirrored the UNIA’s recruitment of people of African descent, and her anticommodified Black Studies utilized a transnational framework and rightly radicalized Black Christian education.

While many of the details of Kinch’s life have been lost to history, the details that remain—married, evangelist, singer, lecturer, teacher, missionary, and follower of Garvey—reveal significant information about her anti-commodified Black Studies. Certainly, she was replete with complexity. On the one hand, she materialized anti-African Christian theology in her school’s earliest formation. On the other hand, she utilized the political intonations of the UNIA to reimagine Christian education and Black American Christians’ relationship to the continent of Africa. Kinch’s complex life, ministry, and Sunday school teachings are an example of the kinds of issues that often plague Black Studies both inside and outside of the university: African essentialism, U.S. centric frameworks, and the demonization of non-Christocentric Africana religions Yet, viewing Kinch’s (and Ferguson’s) work through the lens of Black Studies inheritances challenges contemporary scholars to reckon with our own contradictions. Without question, those of us who engage in Black Studies are charged to put a mirror to our own faces. Careful consideration of her intellectual evolution should encourage us to think about Black Studies as a process of transformation, a shedding of oppressive intellectual chains and a purging of internalized anti-blackness.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Naomi Murakawa, J.T. Roane, and Skyler Gordon for offering comments on earlier versions of this article, and to the reviewers, for their generous feedback. I am also grateful to Paul Daniels II for listening to my ramblings about it. This essay is the product of my own thinking aloud about Black Christian women who are so easily overlooked and discarded. I am not entirely sure what we do with these inheritances, but I am grateful for these women and their complex lives which mirror so many of our own.