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Amanda Berry Smith
Preaching in the Face of Racism
As an itinerant minister and evangelist in nineteenth-century America, Amanda Berry Smith had three notable strikes against her. She was a woman. She was uneducated. And she was black. None of these obstacles, however, prohibited Amanda from pursuing her God-given calling. She crossed gender, class, and racial barriers to live out her ministry, first in America and then overseas in England, India, and Africa.
Amanda Berry Smith was born a slave in Long Green, Maryland, the oldest of thirteen children, five of whom were born into slavery. Her parents, Samuel and Mariam Berry, lived on adjoining farms. Offered the opportunity by his mistress to “buy himself,” Samuel labored at her dairy farm all day, then walked four miles to harvest in the neighboring fields until one or two o’clock in the morning, after which he walked the four miles home, slept for a couple of hours, and began his labors again the next morning. During what little spare time he could find, Samuel also made handcrafted brooms and husk mats to sell at the market. “He had an important and definite object before him and was willing to sacrifice sleep and rest in order to accomplish it,” Amanda wrote in her 1893 autobiography. “It was not his own liberty alone, but the freedom of his wife and five children. For this he toiled day and night.”1 When Samuel had finally saved up enough, he purchased his own freedom and that of his wife and children.
The Great Mountain Becomes a Molehill
Amanda felt the first faint stirrings of belief as a thirteen-year-old, while attending worship services with her employer at a largely white Methodist church in Pennsylvania. But her yearning for God was quickly diminished by the racism she encountered there. Later, though she longed for deliverance, Amanda questioned the existence of God entirely. “How do you know there is a God?” she asked her deeply religious aunt as they stopped to gaze at a river during an afternoon walk. “My aunt turned and looked at me with a look that went through me like an arrow, then stamping her foot, she said: ‘Don’t you ever speak to me again . . .’ And God broke the snare. I felt it. I felt deliverance from that hour.”2
Throughout most of her life Amanda struggled as a black woman among white believers. Often she suppressed the urge to shout with joy in the midst of worship service, fearful that the white congregants would judge her. One Sunday morning, while listening to the white Methodist holiness leader John Inskip, Amanda clamped a hand over her mouth in an effort to hold still, the devil hissing in her ear, “Look, look at the white people, mind, they will put you out.”3 Later, though, as she left the church, a revelation prompted by Galatians 3:28, “Ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (KJV), temporarily quelled her fear:
Somehow I always had a fear of white people—that is, I was not afraid of them in the sense of doing me harm, or anything of that kind—but a kind of fear because they were white, and were there, and I was black and was here! But that morning on Green Street, as I stood on my feet trembling, I heard these words distinctly . . . the Holy Spirit had made it clear to me. And as I looked at white people that I had always seemed to be afraid of, now they looked so small. The great mountain had become a mole-hill. “Therefore, if the Son shall make you free, then you are free, indeed.”4
Preaching in the Face of Racism
Amanda was preaching regularly by 1869, mainly at black churches throughout Brooklyn and Harlem, although occasionally at white churches, despite the fact that neither the Methodist Church nor the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) supported female preachers. Because she earned so little from preaching, she also worked as a washerwoman, taking in the washing and ironing from wealthier families and often working more than twenty hours at a stretch, simply to earn enough to pay the rent. Although she was married twice, her husbands provided little help. Her first husband, Calvin, whom she married at age seventeen, was killed in the Civil War. Her second, James, abandoned her and their young children. Several of Amanda’s children died at a young age; only her daughter Mazie survived to adulthood.
Amanda prayed constantly while she labored over her endless domestic chores, grateful that the mundane work allowed her the opportunity to grow her relationship with God. “I found out that it was not necessary to be a nun or be isolated away off in some deep retirement to have communion with Jesus,” she wrote. “Many times over my wash-tub and ironing table, and while making my bed and sweeping my house and washing my dishes I have had some of the richest blessings.”5
In 1869, just as Amanda was comfortably settling into her ministry as a preacher in New York, she heard a call from God to “Go out,” first to Salem, New Jersey, and later to the Methodist holiness camp meetings that were spreading up and down the East Coast under Inskip’s leadership. Initially she resisted, stalling in Philadelphia for a week before finally heeding God’s will and continuing on to Salem, where she remained for seven months.
Despite her earlier revelation outside the Green Street church doors, Amanda faced rampant racism at every turn, even as her ministry flourished. When she arrived at the Kennebunkport, Maine, camp meeting as a featured speaker in 1871, Amanda found herself the object of curiosity and disdain among the white crowds. There, Amanda wrote later in her autobiography, she learned the meaning of Hebrews 10:32–33 (NIV): “Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you endured in a great conflict full of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated.”
“There had been a great crowd all day, and everywhere I would go a crowd would follow me,” Amanda wrote about her arrival at the camp meeting. “If I went into a tent they would surround it and stay till I came out, then they would follow me. Sometimes I would slip into a tent away from them. Then I would see them peep in, and if they saw me they would say, ‘Oh! Here is the colored woman. Look!’”6
Later that evening, frustrated and humiliated after a day of public ridicule, Amanda walked into the woods to pray for relief. “I told the Lord how mean I felt because the people had looked at me. I prayed, ‘Help me to throw off that mean feeling, and give me grace to be a gazing stock.’”7 By the next morning, she was relieved of her anger and discomfort, “free as a bird” and liberated once again by God.
As church historian Chris Armstrong notes, Amanda Smith was a “barrier-crosser,” overcoming multiple obstacles to forge new ground in American religious history. “Locked out of leadership within her own denomination, which wanted no part of having women serve as ordained ministers, frequently snubbed among both blacks and whites . . . Smith would become the only black and the only woman member (that is, leader) of the National Camp Meeting Association.”8
Even in the midst of her increasing prominence and popularity as a speaker on the holiness camp meeting circuit, Amanda faced discrimination at every turn. In her autobiography, she recalled one incident in which a white woman boldly asked her if she thought all “colored people wanted to be white.” Amanda replied, “No, we who are the royal black are very well satisfied with His gift to us in this substantial color.”9 She admitted, though, that the color of her skin was at times “very inconvenient,” and she related an incident in which while traveling to California, she was forced to spend the entire night in a hotel lobby because her skin color did not allow her accommodations, dinner, or even a cup of tea. “I could pay the price—yes, that is all right,” she wrote. “I know how to behave—yes, that is all right; I may have on my very best dress so that I look elegant—yes, that is all right; I am known as a Christian lady—yes, that is all right; I will occupy but one chair; I will touch no person’s plate or fork—yes, that is all right; but you are black!”10
On another occasion, a white woman asked Amanda, “I know you cannot be white, but if you could be, would you not rather be white than black?” Again, Amanda answered succinctly, “I would rather be black and fully saved than to be white and not saved; I was bad enough, black as I am, and I would have been ten times worse if I had been white.”11
On the other hand, Amanda had this to say to those who assumed she was always treated fairly and kindly: “If you want to know and understand what Amanda Smith has to contend with, just turn black and go about as I do, and you will come to a different conclusion. I think some people would understand the quintessence of sanctifying grace if they could be black for about twenty-four hours.”12
While she often used humor to soften the sting of her commentary—she noted that it was a good thing God made her black because, given the option, she surely would have chosen pea-green, a color she was passionately fond of as a young girl—Amanda was very clear about the painful and destructive effects of racism. As Armstrong notes, Amanda’s autobiography exemplifies her unique ministry, not only as a preacher from the pulpit and in print about the sanctified faith of the holiness movement, but also as a frank spokesperson about the realities of racism in postbellum America.
The Answer Is the Grace of God
Where, one might wonder, did Amanda Smith find the courage and strength to pursue her ministry in the face of such pervasive racism? How did she not succumb to bitterness and resentment in the midst of such daunting race, class, and gender discrimination? How did she persevere in a ministry that not only crisscrossed America but also led her to evangelize as the first black missionary in England, India, and Africa? The answer, Amanda would say, was the grace of God.
For her entire evangelistic career Amanda Smith preached that sanctification—the process of becoming holy through Christ—was the key to both personal salvation and earthly contentedness. It was her steadfast belief in sanctification that allowed Amanda not only to transcend anger and bitterness but also to work relentlessly for the greater good of all people, including her oppressors. “We need to be saved deep to make us thorough, all around, out and out,” she wrote, “come up to the standard of Christians, and not bring the standard down to us.”13
No matter the offenses and hardships she personally suffered, Amanda Smith would never stoop to sully Christ by lowering his standards. Her mission was to bring people, including her persecutors, up to Christ’s standards. Her prayer for all people—“Lord, help the people to see”14—was simple, but it’s a prayer just as relevant for us today.