1.6

“Ethiopia Shall Stretch” from America to Africa

THE PAN-AFRICAN CRUSADE OF CHARLES MORRIS

Benedict Carton and Robert Trent Vinson

Abstract: In 1899 a sacred song, “Let My People Go,” embodied the suffering and striving of black peoples in the United States and South Africa. This hymn had become the clarion call of Charles Morris, a black Baptist missionary, and his Xhosa converts in the Cape Colony, seeking deliverance from white supremacy through Pan-African faith, education, and politics. Their crusade would shape the course of twentieth-century democracy.

Keywords: South Africa, transnational, imperialism, white supremacy, uplift, Ethiopianism, Pan-African, Wilmington, Jim Crow

PRELUDE

In 1899 a black Baptist missionary named Charles Morris traveled from the United States to South Africa. His sojourn through the British Cape Colony illuminates the shared suffering and striving of black people in South Africa and the United States, and their transnational contributions to democracy in both countries. Morris sailed an old route to Cape Town taken by black New England whalers and the Confederate warship Alabama carrying “human cargo” to Africa. When he docked in Cape Town, the Virginia Jubilee Singers, black American performers, had just finished their acclaimed tour of South Africa. The troupe regaled spectators with Booker T. Washington’s parable about moving “up from slavery” to Christian education—a tale captivating black congregations of the National Baptist Convention (NBC) and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church throughout the United States. Graduates of Virginia’s Hampton Institute, the Jubilee Singers and their maestro, Orpheus McAdoo, performed the anthem of Emancipation, “Go Down Moses.” They soulfully conjured “When Israel was in Egypt’s land,” a metaphor for plantation bondage. Defiant verses ensued: “Let my people go, / Oppress’d so hard they could not stand, / Let my people go.” This Negro spiritual not only resonated across the Atlantic but also deeply affected black audiences enduring racial discrimination under British colonialism.

The Jubilee Singers, the AME Church, and the NBC paved the way for black Americans, “sing[ing] praises unto the Lord,” to evangelize in South Africa. A trailblazer in this effort, the Reverend Charles Morris envisioned Christianity “stretching forth” to the “continent where the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness must first be sought.” He would gladly depart the segregated United States for segregated Cape Town as a self-styled “Twentieth Century Ethiopian,” adopting the biblical persona of Psalms 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; O sing praises unto the Lord.” Such scripture vindicated the sacred claim of black people to worldly freedom. For men like Morris facing violent racism at home, the missionary fields of South Africa offered solace and opportunity. Morris would leave behind a country celebrating Theodore Roosevelt’s “Anglo-Saxon” exploits, if one believed this future president’s account of his Rough Rider conquests in Cuba. Morris was among those who did not. Before embarking for South Africa, he praised the unsung “manhood” of “colored troops” supporting the Rough Riders in combat. Upon arrival in South Africa, he felt the “degrading” weight of “imperial” America lift from his body. Morris had come home to the place he had dreamed of as a youth, intending to develop “Negro manhood” through his understanding of Old Testament prophecy: “‘Ethiopia shall arise . . . and suddenly stretch forth her hand unto God.’ If this taxes credulity, quarrel with God.”

BEGINNING

Morris’s religious destiny took shape in his childhood. Born during the final year of the Civil War, he grew up in Kentucky. As a teenager Morris studied at Wilberforce University, the historically black school in Ohio that would offer a professorship to Pan-African pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois and open its doors to Xhosa and Zulu converts of South African missionaries. Morris’s education included stories of the “splendid continent of his forefathers” and headlines of an 1881 circus featuring “heroic” South Africans. Barnstorming through Kentucky and Ohio, this “ethnological showcase” spotlighted Princess Amadaga, the reputed niece of the Zulu king Cetshwayo, deposed by British military conquest in 1879. A brochure described her retinue and their “life and adventures in Zululand; how they fought their foes in defense of their homes; . . . how their King Cetewayo [sic] was captured; how they and Princess AmaZulu were induced to come to this country.” Ringmasters lauded the royals: “[N]o true Zulu will ever break his word or insult a woman.” Other “virtues” were highlighted, among them the ritual praises of an American missionary bowing to King Cetshwayo, who in turn saluted her with the phrase “‘Utali witu mina niam!’ (My white sister!).” This Zulu phrase and scene appeared centrally in the brochure. Morris was also inspired by an encounter in Ohio one decade later with members of a “Kaffir choir” from South Africa. Then a music promoter, he heard the vocalists explain that the slavery lamented in Negro spirituals was anathema to their people. Members of the choir went on to attend Wilberforce in defiance of colonial bans back home prohibiting their entrance in premier schools.

Around this time Morris’s own talents were destined for the stage. In 1888 he was a magnetic speaker for the Republican Party, stumping for candidates as Frederick Douglass’s protégé. At campaign rallies Morris flanked the eminent abolitionist, whose eloquent plea for a more perfect union was legendary. (See figure 1.6.1.) Douglass counseled his apprentice: “It will be said . . . that you are putting on airs . . . but . . . I know your ability and worth, and rejoice in every blow you strike at wrong.” From the dais Douglass introduced his “thunder and lightning,” the young Morris, who urged black voters to vindicate their rights to a democratic Promised Land. “Voting always,” Morris intoned, and “when the Ku-Klux” stand “armed about the polls,” come “up to the danger line.”’ If “the negro” be “bitterly denounce[ed],” he assured his audience, the Bible divined “centuries ago” that black liberation was imminent. Psalms 68:31 foretold that the “Ethiopian shall stretch forth his hands to God.” While he revered Douglass, Morris did not share his mentor’s views of African “barbarism.”

The semantic differences between Ethiopian and barbarism reveal the “ambivalent place Africa [held] in the imaginations of its ‘New World’ descendants,” write historians Sidney Lemelle and Robin Kelley—an ambivalence expressed in rhetoric “conservative and atavistic,” but invariably oppositional to racism. Indeed, by the early 1890s Morris’s political homilies were assailing the Jim Crow system, which entrenched white supremacy and “savage” lynching in many states. If America would not accept its emancipated millions, another continent would. “A quarter of a century after slavery,” Morris reminded black Republicans, their “million and a half children in the public schools, twenty thousand in academies and colleges, . . . [and] as many ministers” should assist the “missionary effort” in Africa.

FIG. 1.6.1. Charles Morris and Frederick Douglass, ca. 1888. HU Mooreland Library.

Such ideals of transnational “racial uplift” entailed solidarity with the anti-lynching movement of Ida Wells, Morris’s one-time romantic interest. During the 1880s Wells had corresponded with her “Challie boy,” as she teased Morris before he wed Annie Sprague, the granddaughter of Frederick Douglass. By the early 1890s, Wells was urging African Americans to question the “doctored reports of lynchings” in the mainstream press. She published Southern Horrors, a best-selling pamphlet attributing “lynch law in all its phases” to the “lie that Negro men rape white women.” Morris remained in touch with Wells while he was the personal secretary of Douglass, who applauded Southern Horrors as having “no equal to it in convincing power.”

Douglass introduced Wells to his enthusiasts on the other side of the Atlantic, principally the English Quaker Catherine Impey, editor of Anti-Caste, a journal devoted to fighting racial discrimination. In 1892 Impey sailed from London to meet Douglass in the United States, staying briefly with Annie Sprague. British readers of Anti-Caste helped Wells navigate complex humanitarian networks during her anti-lynching tours of Europe in 1893 and 1894. She convinced stewards of “human rights in Empire,” including associates of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa professing to be “friends of the native,” to condemn American lynching. Her overseas accomplishments laid a foundation for Morris’s plan to unite black Americans, British allies, and African subjects in a global quest for “racial uplift.”

PREPARATION

By the mid-1890s, however, Morris was no longer pursuing politics. Grieving for loved ones, he pivoted from Republican favor to God’s grace. Frederick Douglass had passed away in 1895—a blow Morris felt more acutely after the tragic death of his wife, Annie Sprague, two years prior. She succumbed to illness while carrying the couple’s first child. He, too, began to mourn the loss of his party, gravely infected by “martial” Republicans urging intervention in a Cuban war of independence waged by former slaves. Late in 1895 Morris entered Newton Theological Seminary as Roosevelt demanded America annex Cuba (while drafting his treatise on the “perfectly stupid” Negro). Affording a sanctuary of anti-imperialism and civility, Newton Theological instructed “men to preach the gospel” like “foreign missionaries of distinguished usefulness.” Graduates were groomed for careers in the “American Baptist Missionary Union and . . . American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” which furnished “opportunities to meet . . . those who” preached the gospel of peace in South Africa and elsewhere.

Morris’s years at Newton (1895–98) coincided with a wave of “anti-Negro jingoism” driven by currents of social Darwinism and its imperialist exemplars such as Roosevelt, then considered a racial liberal, whose Republican cause Morris once served. The upsurge in racial oppression brought lynch mobs from the South to the Midwest, US Supreme Court legalization of “separate-but-equal” (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896), and violent raids on state authority. The most notorious invasion occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, where white supremacists murdered African Americans. In November 1898, a coup d’état overthrew this city’s ruling coalition of black Republicans and white populists. Wilmington was initially overrun by a paramilitary unit known as the Red Shirts. Unlike Klansmen, Red Shirts wore no disguise. Yet this was a minor deviation in brotherhoods of terror goaded into action by neo-Confederates, like the South Carolina senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, who aimed to destroy black churches, businesses, and governments. The ex-congressman Alfred Waddell reinforced the Red Shirts with the First North Carolina, a regiment of white army veterans wielding weapons from the Cuba theater. Waddell incited his vigilantes: “You are Anglo-Saxons. . . . [I]f you find the negro outvoting [sic], tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, . . . [s]hoot him down in his tracks.” This command turned to duty. Thomas Dixon, one of Roosevelt’s political donors and favorite novelists, whose book The Clansman would script D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, hailed the white “Wilmington revolutionists . . . [for] important work in the preservation of our civilization.” By contrast, an African-American woman begged the White House to provide her safe passage from Wilmington to Africa.

As a newly remarried pastor of Myrtle Baptist Church outside Boston, Morris spoke publicly of witnessing the Wilmington massacre. Fearing for the future of his own family—including his wife, the former Sadie Waterman—he recounted how households escaped their torched homes only to be hunted down, with one “Negro shot twenty times in the back . . . thousands of women and children fleeing in terror . . . [all] in the name of civilization . . . [and] the reformation of . . . Wilmington.” Was this “Russia”? No, he retorted; the pogrom occurred “within three hundred miles of the White House . . . thanking God for having enabled it to break the Spanish yoke from the neck of Cuba.” Morris likened US imperialism to a brutal “crusade” that installed the “white pulpit of Wilmington.” He concluded with a story of the “Good Samaritan” traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho to get help for his son wounded by criminals. Morris compared the fate of this descendant, “bleeding at his own threshold,” with that of African Americans awaiting rescue. Shortly after the birth of his first child with Sadie Morris, christened Charles Jr., the new father cast his eyes to South Africa, where he would proselytize for the Baptists.

LAUNCHING

Morris set sail in June 1899 for his “Jericho,” Cape Town, conveying the spirit of activism enjoined by Ida Wells and his hero, Booker T. Washington. Like Wells, in leaving the nascent American empire (and its “anti-Negro jingoism”), Morris would pivot to an older English empire, his symbol of opportunity in South Africa. Morris knew that Cecil Rhodes was the embodiment of British power in Cape Town. If Rhodes, from a certain distance and in a certain light, could be seen as a moral champion of black rights, he had another appeal. Morris carried seed money from the NBC and the endorsements of Booker T. Washington and the AME clergy, who had gone to South Africa three years before. These sponsors and the NBC contingent in Cape Town led by the Reverend R.A. Jackson could not fund very much. Thus Morris looked to Rhodes, the mining magnate, for a grant to build vocational schools.

When Morris reached South Africa in August 1899, he was awed by the rich resources and serenading echoes of his youth. Morris’s impressions were published by a Xhosa Christian newspaper in the Cape, Imvo Zabantsundu. “The soil in many places is exceedingly . . . fertile,” he reported, producing “everything from wheat, oats and corn, back from the coast, to oranges, bananas, sugar, cotton, tobacco.” He listened “day and night” to “Kaffir . . . jubilee hymns.” Morris’s rapturous amazement provoked distressing memories as well: “After one gets here he wonders why our people have such an everlasting dread of coming to Africa. Why we will be shot down,” lynched, and “burned to a handful of human cinders or ‘Jim Crowed’ . . . when here is a vast continent.” Not yet attuned to his South African milieu, Morris contrasted the slayings of African Americans in North Carolina with Xhosa Christian dedication to the British Crown: “So much for my treatment in the Queen’s dominions. . . . God bless her, I don’t wonder that her African subjects are loyal to her. They certainly have infinitely more reason to sing ‘God save the Queen’ than we have to sing [the] hypocrite ‘My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty.’” He contemplated “a black man singing that” with “Negroes slowly bleeding to death in the red gutters of Wilmington.” Morris was drawn to the notion of British “equality under the law” but did not mention how Cape “liberalism” limited the franchise to a small group of African Christian men.

Through NBC channels Morris secured an appointment with Rhodes, confident the patron would finance schools that would hire “young men and women . . . [from] America as leaders of this work.” The Boston Colored American Magazine described their meeting in grand terms, comparing its scope to Rhodes’s dream of “cast[ing] up a highway” from Cape to Cairo. How much the American Baptist learned of his prospective benefactor’s opinions is difficult to know. Prolific and observant, Morris was silent on Rhodes’s notorious boast that he “preferred land to niggers.”

Departing empty-handed, Morris reflected, “Poor as I am, I would not have changed places with the empire builder of South Africa.” The Baptist missionary quickly moved to develop partnerships with African ministers who shared in a “providential design” famously articulated by the AME minister Absalom Jones: “Who knows but that a Joseph may rise up among them who shall be the instrument of feeding the African nations the bread of life?” Such prophesy animated Morris as he visited NBC missions in Port Elizabeth, East London, Middledrift, Queenstown, and Qumbu. During these travels through the Eastern Cape, he noted prejudice against “the native . . . in many of the English churches [which] . . . were not willing to allow a Kaffir to come within the doors and worship God.” Unlike colonial clergy, Morris relished the chance to pray with Africans. Fatefully, he met a progenitor of the “Ethiopian Movement, who . . . was driven out of the Church of England because . . . as the Europeans and the Kaffirs bowed around the altar, the rector whispered to this man, ‘Tell your people there is not enough bread to go around.’” Morris marveled at the results—more and more black preachers singing a familiar spiritual with their local congregation: “Oh! go down, Moses, / Away down to Egypt’s land, / And tell King Pharaoh / To let my people go.” Such full-throated pride in African Christianity, historian Robert Edgar argues, challenged white churchmen who refused “to allow their black counterparts in leadership posts.”

Morris stayed in hotbeds of independent African Christianity like Lovedale—a mission guided by the Reverend Walter Rubusana—exulted in revivals, and baptized hundreds of Ethiopian followers. These experiences deeply touched Morris. “If anyone had told me I should find such intelligent, bright faced, thoughtful people,” he gushed, “I would have said that it is absurd to expect to find men of such breadth, such culture, such ability in Africa.” In September he wrote from Lovedale to Booker T. Washington, rejoicing in the industriousness of “strong and vigorous” neophytes who were “breaking away from the churches which evangelized them,” establishing independent congregations, and arranging “to . . . contact . . . American negro religious teachers.”

The Cape preachers with close ties to Morris, such as Rev. Rubusana of Lovedale and the Reverend Jonas Goduka of the African Native Church, used their Sunday schools to train activists. Several of their teachers started Nelson Mandela’s political party. In fact, Rubusana was a founder in 1912 of the South African Native National Congress, or SANNC, forerunner of the African National Congress (ANC). (See figure 1.6.2.) For his part, Rev. Goduka welcomed “Dear Brother” Morris: “Loyalty to the Scriptures . . . Baptist views . . . [and] independency of churches.” Their spiritual commitment to Ethiopianism hinged on revolutionary action, with Africans at the vanguard, according to the Voice of the Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois’s medium.

FIG. 1.6.2. Founding members of the SANNC (forerunner of the ANC), with the Reverend Walter Rubusana standing on the left. HU Mooreland Library.

Not long after Morris landed back home, the Voice of the Negro publicized Ethiopian “doctrines which have inspired the natives with a spirit of independence” and filled the Cape government with fear. The official alarm was not narrow-minded but global facing, for “English colonial” authority realized that “the American Negro is most active in stirring up the cause. He knows by experience of the haughty white man and is advising the natives to seize time by the forelock and be at least master of his own country.” At a large ecumenical conference in 1900 Morris proclaimed this cause: “[T]he American Negro had been marvelously preserved and Christianized for a purpose . . . destined to play a star part in the great drama of the world’s development.” The returned Baptist had acolytes to prove it. While in South Africa, Morris converted African chiefs, including one who sent sons with the returning missionary to study at Lincoln University and Virginia Theological Seminary. Morris helped build an educational pipeline that gave four hundred black South Africans opportunities to attend US colleges and universities by the early twentieth century. Two graduates, John Dube and Pixley Seme, became the first president and treasurer, respectively, of the ANC—future stars in one great drama of world development: the birth of democracy in South Africa.

HORIZON

Morris’s experience in South Africa imbued him with an appreciation of the twentieth-century “color line,” a concept coined by Du Bois to describe how racism scarred the hemispheres. By 1905 Ethiopian fervor had shifted Morris’s politics from civilizing-mission gradualism to assertive self-determination. The next year Morris participated in the Niagara Movement, which would lay the foundation for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the preeminent civil rights organization in the United States. Meanwhile, he straddled his pulpit in the (now-famous Manhattan) Abyssinian church, where he repudiated President Roosevelt for disparaging black freedom fighters at home and abroad. The New York Times quoted the Baptist firebrand: “‘Theodore Roosevelt, once enshrined in our love as our Moses, now enshrouded in our scorn as our Judas.’” Morris amplified black nationalists who, in the words of Du Bois, linked the mentality of “colonial exploitation” in Africa with Roosevelt’s mind-set at home, slamming the door of equality “in the black man’s face.”

While Morris recognized Du Bois’s definition of white supremacy as the “possession . . . of the dark millions,” they both rejected this fate, electing instead to foster African alliances in advance of a gathering struggle to erase the color line. In this regard Morris’s Cape sojourn was a gateway act of the unfolding twentieth-century play called Pan-Africanism. This long-running drama, codirected by Du Bois and his rival Marcus Garvey, thrilled and chilled the United States and South Africa during the interwar years. Their diasporic disciples encouraged new leaders educated by American Christians, including ANC presidents Dr. Alfred Xuma and Albert Luthuli, to look beyond the nation-state for social justice. Indeed, as Morris had before, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would ally himself with kindred South Africans like Luthuli, and together they would stretch out their hands singing an Ethiopian jubilee spiritual, “Let My People Go,” still today the global chorus of civil rights.

NOTE

The authors wish to thank Robert Edgar, Michael O’Malley, Jennifer Ritterhouse, and Greg Robinson for their scholarly contributions.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Bay, Mia. To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Hill & Wang, 2010.

Campbell, James. Songs of Zion: The African American Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Edgar, Robert. “New Religious Movements.” In Missions and Empire, edited by Norman Etherington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture during the Twentieth Century. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Magubane, Zine. Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Vinson, Robert Trent. The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012.

Williams, Walter. Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

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BENEDICT CARTON is Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History and Africa Coordinator of African and African American Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He studies the transnational dimensions of southern African history. His publications include Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa (University of Virginia Press, 2000) and Zulu Identities: Being Zulu Past and Present (Columbia University Press, 2009; coeditor and coauthor). His next book, with Robert Trent Vinson, is called Shaka’s Progeny, a Transnational History: Americans, Zulus and the Making of Diasporic Worlds, 1820–2000.

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ROBERT TRENT VINSON is the Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the College of William and Mary. He teaches and writes on ancient and modern Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. He is interested in cultural and intellectual histories, imperialism, and colonialism. His publications include The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012), and Before Mandela, like a King: The Prophetic Politics of Chief Albert Luthuli (Ohio University Press, forthcoming).