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Keywords

Pan-Africanism, African Methodist Episcopal Church, African American missionaries, Alexander Crummell, identity formation

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a more complete analysis of the various conceptions of race and identity held by African American missionaries working in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there has been some attention paid to African American missionaries working in Africa at this time, very little has been written about how their different theological beliefs impacted their conceptions of race and identity as it is related to the native African population they are interacting with. Through thorough analysis, it can be determined that there were distinct links between the different theological beliefs held by African American missionaries working in Africa at this time and their conceptions of race. For example, evangelical African American missionaries more often associated themselves with a Pan-African identity than non-evangelical ones. Alongside this, their theological understandings of the Back-to-Africa movement were quite different depending on where they worked in Africa and it impacted how they viewed themselves in association with the native African populations they interacted with. Finally, different conceptions of race and identity manifested themselves along eschatological lines with different views on the means of attaining salvation correlating with opposing conceptions of race. The significance of these findings is that although these missionaries’ conceptions of race have already been analyzed, the connection to their theological beliefs is rather unexplored.

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