Africa and the American Negro. Addresses and Proceedings of the Congress on Africa . .

Atlanta: Gammon Theological Seminary, 1896. Very good. 9” x 6”. Green cloth over boards; spine title gilt. Pp. 242 + 23 unnumbered plates. Very good: cloth lightly scuffed with faint damp stains to rear; rear hinge starting; light foxing to prelims; 3” tear to internal title page, affecting only a copyright statement, still legible; former owner's signature to front pastedown.

This is a massive compilation of essays concerning the spiritual progress of Africa and African Americans following a heavy period of European colonization. The essays were presented by both Black and white speakers at a Congress on Africa held as part of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895.

The compiler of the work and secretary of the Congress, J.E.W. Bowen, was born into slavery in New Orleans in 1855. In 1878 he graduated with the first class from New Orleans University, established by the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) to educate freed slaves, and in 1887 became the first African American to earn a PhD from Boston University. He pastored in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., also teaching church history and theology at Morgan College and Hebrew at Howard University. In 1893 Bowen became the first full-time Black professor at Gammon Theological Seminary (GTS) in Atlanta, founded by the MEC to train African American clergy. He served as secretary of the school's Stewart Missionary Foundation for Africa and editor of the Stewart Missionary Magazine. He also launched and edited The Voice of the Negro with Jesse Max Barber in 1904. Bowen served as GTS president from 1906 to 1910 and as head of the church history department, taught there until 1932 and died in 1933.

This Congress was sponsored by GTS and held in Atlanta in 1895, in conjunction with the exposition where Booker T. Washington famously delivered his “Atlanta Compromise” address. Evangelists, educators and missionaries from across the country gathered to discuss the spiritual welfare of a recently heavily colonized Africa, delivering papers on topics such as “Africa in Its Relation to Christian Civilization” and the continent's “Absolute Need of an Indigenous Missionary Agency.” The book features 22 illustrated plate portraits of the essays' authors, eight of whom were African American and three women. There are two pieces by Orishetukah Faduma of the Yoruba Tribe of West Africa. The first African to enroll and graduate from Yale Divinity School, he was a prominent speaker and educator throughout Sierra Leone and the United States. Another two were by Alexander Crummell, the first recorded Black student and graduate of Cambridge University and a longtime Liberian missionary. White writers included May French Sheldon, organizer and leader of an independent expedition in East Africa and one of the first women to be admitted into the Royal Geographical Society; Hampton Institute educator of folklore Alice Mabel Bacon; and John William Hamilton, secretary of the Freedmen's Aid Society who proclaimed, “Africans – Afro-Americans! Ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints and of the household of God.”

After the essays, the book ran the detailed minutes of the Congress, two “Prize Hymns Written by American Negroes” and an alphabetical list of missions throughout Africa and their “nationality of senders.” There are also two photographic images revealing internal views of the GTS library and missionary center. This book's former owner, E.L. Wheaton, was an alumni of Clark University and active with the Georgia conference of the AME Church. He was also a political delegate and attorney who served as vice president of the Black National Bar Association.

An impressive collection of essays on Africa and African Americans. Reasonably well-represented in institutions; this a nice copy owned by an active Black lawyer. (Inventory #: 8814)