BOOK REVIEWS
The History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church. By George F. Bragg, Rector St. James First African Church, Baltimore. With an Introduction by the Rt. Rev. T. DuBose Bratton, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Mississippi. The Church Advocate Press, Baltimore, 1922, pp. 319.
This work is intended to supply the need of a volume tracing the connection of the Negro with the Protestant Episcopal Church in America. As this particular group of communicants has not the status of independent organization, its peculiar history has remained only in fragments. To embody these in the form of a handy volume to show how this denomination has influenced the life of the Negro and how members of the race have been affected thereby, will be a distinct service for which the public would feel thankful. Whether or not the author has accomplished this task the readers themselves will decide. He has undertaken the work with so much enthusiasm and found so many things to praise and such a few to condemn that the reader may find the work somewhat ex parte. The struggle of the Negro communicants in this denomination and its indifference toward the strivings of the race before the Civil War are not emphasized. Approaching the volume with reservation, however, the investigator will find the work of some value.
The volume begins with the early baptism of African children during the early days. He directs attention to the work of missionaries in South Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, and Virginia and brings his story down to the days of the independent movement among Negro communicants as it culminated in the organization of the Free African Society of Philadelphia out of which emerged the St. Thomas African Church under the leadership of Absalom Jones. He then discusses the rise of such churches as St. Phillips in New York, St. James in Baltimore, Christ Church in Providence, St. Luke in New Haven, The Church of the Crucifixion in Philadelphia, St. Matthews in Detroit, St. Phillips in New Jersey and St. Phillips in Buffalo. The renewed interest of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the uplift of the Negro is interwoven around his discussion of the Freedman's Commission organized in 1868 to Christianize and educate the Negroes recently emancipated in the South. He then discusses the further interest shown by the General Convention of 1871 and treats with some detail the efforts through mission schools in the South.
The remaining portion of the book consists of biographical sketches. It contains a list of the Negro clergy prior to 1866, mentioning such names as Absalom Jones, Peter Williams, William Levington, James C. Ward, Jacob Oson, Gustavus V. Caesar, Edward Jones, William Douglass, Isaiah G. DeGrasse, Alexander Crummell, Eli Worthington Stokes, William C. Munroe, Samuel Vreeland Berry, Harrison Holmes Webb, James Theodore Holly, William Johnson Alston, and John Peterson. Among these are accounts of such veteran friends as Bishops Atkinson, Lyman, Johns, Whittie, Smith, Quintard, Whittingham, Howe, Stevens, Young, and Dudley, along with Mr. Joseph Bryan, General Samuel C. Armstrong, and Mrs. Loomis L. White. He then gives sketches of some self-made strong characters like James E. Thompson, Cassius M. C. Mason, James Solomon Russell, James Nelson Denver, Henry Mason Joseph, Henry Stephen McDuffy, Primus Priss Alston, Paulus Moort, Henry L. Phillips, August E. Jensen, Joshua Bowden Massiah, William Victor Tunnell, and John W. Perry. Honorable mention is given to Samuel David Ferguson, John Payne, Edward T. Demby, Henry B. Delany, and T. Momolu Gardiner.
The Trend of the Races. By George E. Haynes, Ph.D. With an introduction by James H. Dillard. Published jointly by Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada. New York, 1922, pp. 205.
This volume is at once both historical and sociological. It is interesting but might have been more readable if the materials had been better organized so as to avoid unnecessary repetition from chapter to chapter. It marks an epoch in the history of the Negro in the United States, however, in that it was written at the request of white persons constituting the Joint Committee on Home Mission Literature representing the Missionary Education Movement and the Council of Women for Home Missions and the Missionary Educational Boards. The aim of the work is to present to the white workers in the Church the achievements of the Negro, believing that if the Negro becomes known to the white man, he will not be any longer hated by him; or, as the chairman of the committee herself says in the foreword to the volume: "Our seeking to know him must be on the basis of the broadest sympathy. In the friendliest and most helpful spirit we should sincerely desire to understand him in the place where he is and to apprehend something of the road by which he came and the direction of his highest and best aspirations, that we may, so far as we can, make it possible for him to attain his best in our common civilization. We should at the same time quite as earnestly seek to know ourselves in respect to our limitations, achievements, and goals in the building of the social order."