Adapted from the article first published as “Ebony Beams in the Foundation” in The Alliance Witness October 24, 1984. Additional reporting done by Martha Renaud, managing editor of Alliance Life.
by Samuel Stoesz
Almost from the beginning, African-American ministries have been an integral aspect of the cosmopolitan and missionary nature of The Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). As early as 1898, A. B. Simpson, founder of the C&MA, commented in an editorial in The Alliance Weekly:
“One of the most unique and encouraging features of the Alliance work in Ohio and Pennsylvania is the successful organization of a number of strong branches of our beloved colored brethren.”
While in Pittsburgh near the time of that editorial, Simpson had been a guest at the Hotel Anderson and found that all but 7 of 34 African-American waiters there were members of The Alliance. The Pittsburgh branch was supporting a missionary and had been instrumental in forming other branches in Pennsylvania. Also, African-American branches in Ohio were supporting several missionaries. “These people,” Simpson observed, “were naturally attracted to the heart-stirring truths and the deep spirituality of the Alliance movement.”
Early African-American Churches
The roots of the African-American works in Cleveland and Pittsburgh are best understood through a knowledge of the leaders.
Mattie A. Bowles and her husband, W. O. Bowles, had come to Cleveland in 1889. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bowles were educated African-Americans, Mr. Bowles having been a superintendent of schools in Dayton, Ohio.
Not long after arriving, Mrs. Bowles began weekly prayer services in her home. These had been going on for some time when Mrs. Bell H. Smoot began to attend in 1892. Born in Kentucky and recently arrived in Cleveland, Mrs. Smoot was a new Christian. Her contact with Mrs. Bowles and the “full gospel” teachings of the prayer group brought together two powerful church workers. The women began door-to-door visitation to capture the lost for the kingdom of Christ.
For the next year they toiled in what Mrs. Bowles described as rescue work among the poorer classes of the city. By the end of that year they had rented a storefront and on September 8, 1895, organized as a hand of the Christian Alliance. A month later the two Alliance women planned and held a missionary evangelistic convention.
The group grew rapidly, forcing them to move to another storefront. During 1896 and 1897 they held conventions in five nearby cities, from Pittsburgh to Columbus. The second annual Cleveland convention in 1897 raised $596 for the foreign missions work supported by the Christian Alliance.
From Cleveland Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Smoot spread the influence of The Alliance to African Americans across the United States. In 1898 the two women traveled to Kentucky to begin the work there and eventually established Alliance connections in Tennessee as well. By the end of 1903, Mrs. Smoot had traveled all the way across country with E. B. Nichols of Pittsburgh, reaching Pasadena, California, after visiting African-American Alliance bands in several cities of Kansas and Nebraska.
The founder of the Alliance branch in Pittsburgh and pastor until his death in 1911 was William Peter Robinson. Born in Farmville, Virginia, in 1853 to slave parents, Peter Robinson was converted at age 13. Upon arriving in Pittsburgh around the year 1883, he joined the Wylie Avenue AME Church and eventually held positions there as steward, trustee, class leader, and then local preacher. Through another member of Wylie Avenue Church, Mr. Robinson was introduced to the doctrines of holiness and divine healing.
Several years later Mr. Robinson had a deeper-life experience, and along with this he claimed to have undergone divine healing from a number of physical ailments, including heart trouble and rheumatism. He then organized meetings to teach these truths, holding them in his own home before moving to the home of Mr. Nichols in 1893 and organizing as Pittsburgh Branch No. 2 of the Christian Alliance. As in Cleveland, Branch No. 2 in Pittsburgh became known as a place where “many white and colored were saved, sanctified, and healed to the honor and glory of God.”
Because of the interdenominational nature of The Alliance at that time, it is difficult to determine exactly how many African-American works were associated with this movement. Clearly, however, there was a considerable number.
African-American Schools
Workers were needed to sustain the branches already established and for outreach at home and abroad. Consequently, several efforts were made to create schools to train African Americans for ministry. However, none of these attempts met with permanent success.
The story of the Mary Mullen School in Uree, North Carolina, illustrates the struggles that were involved in an attempt to establish a “school of the prophets” among African Americans. Hatred and animosity from the surrounding community originating from both blacks and whites resulted in the burning of the main building and threats to dynamite any attempt to rebuild. The strife outside sometimes brought tension and grievances within the school.
After opening in 1908, the school closed in 1916; reopened in 1924, closed in 1934; reopened in 1947 and closed for the final time in 1953. Though the Education Department of the Alliance made several investments in the school in the hope that it might become indigenous, it did not succeed.
Charles Cullis of Boston purchased the Randolph-Macon College property in Boydton, Virginia, in 1879, intending to offer higher education to African Americans, particularly to preachers who had been deprived of such an opportunity. In 1911 this was turned over to The Alliance and was merged with the Lovejoy Missionary Institute, a school for African Americans opened in 1906 by Emily Pruden and Joanna Moore. Originally, Lovejoy was located only 20 miles from the Mullen School. The Boydton Missionary Institute, as it was called, had an intermittent history until it was turned over to the Holiness Church of Christ in 1923.
Other attempts to form African-American Alliance training schools were also eventually frustrated. The entire record cannot be chronicled here, but the examples cited above illustrate what became a pattern.
African-American Foreign Missionaries
Initially, African Americans were also directly involved in Alliance work overseas. The first black missionary of the C&MA, Miss Carrie Merriweather, went to Africa in 1913. In the ’20s, seven more joined her in Sierra Leone. Dr. Simpson and the Alliance Board of Managers anticipated that blacks could be served more effectively by blacks than by whites.
However, this did not prove to be true in the colonially oriented fields of Africa. The colonial governments of Sierra Leone, Belgian Congo, and French West Africa actually requested The Alliance not to send black missionaries. Missionary Franklin Ballard observed that “the colonial situation caused the African people to deny proper respect to those of their own race from other countries, a condition which greatly handicapped the colored missionaries and impaired them in their work.”
Decisions regarding the place of black missionaries in the overseas work of the C&MA were undoubtedly also influenced in some degree by racial prejudices—a social legacy that has gradually changed only in more recent times. But on the basis of the attitudes of foreign governments, Alliance officials determined in 1930 not to send African Americans as missionaries.
While whites felt the attitude of native populations overseas at that time precluded black missionaries from being sent, this signaled to the blacks that they were being deprived of full participation in what The Alliance held as its main purpose: missions.
Decline and Its Remedy
Absence of a permanent, viable training school for workers plus the lack of opportunity for blacks to be directly involved in foreign missions eventually led to a decline in the number of African-American Alliance members and African-American Alliance works. Undoubtedly, other circumstances were also involved. In 1984 in the United States there were 19 African-American Alliance churches with an average attendance per church of about 30. Presently, there are 30 African-American Alliance churches with an average attendance per church of about 58.*
In recent years The Alliance has sought to reestablish some of the dynamics that will encourage an expanded role for African Americans in this movement. In 1975 a black national field was established for the United States. Rev. Charles Williams of Portland, Oregon, served as director. African-American leaders have served on the Board of Managers.
Alliance schools have sought to enroll African Americans in their programs. As of the fall 2017 semester, African Americans accounted for the following percentages of each student body:
- Crown College—8%
- Nyack College and Alliance Theological Seminary—30%
- Simpson University and A. W. Tozer Seminary—5%
- Toccoa Falls College—10%
Restrictions concerning the service of African Americans as overseas missionaries has been dropped. In 1955 the Foreign Department recommended sending black missionaries to fields that would receive them. In 1956 the Board of Managers approved this new policy. Now in 2018, there are two African-American couples serving with The Alliance in creative-access countries through marketplace ministries.
The Lessons of History
In the beginning African Americans were attracted to the message and ministry of the Alliance movement. Hopefully this will continue to be true. We must learn from the past that to grow ethnic churches, equal rights and privileges must he cultivated mutually whatever the cost. Indigenous leadership training is crucial not only for the growth of the church but also for its very survival.
The contribution of African Americans to the heritage of The Christian and Missionary Alliance has been significant. May their contribution increase!
*Stats taken from the 2016 Annual Report
Samuel Stoesz, ThD, was a pastor and professor of pastoral studies at Canadian Theological Seminary. He was coauthor of a history of the C&MA for the centennial. He died in 2011.