In this second volume, David H. Bradley picks up the story of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion in 1873. From there he follows A. M. E. Zion’s growth through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, showing the denomination’s special capacity for empowering lay people to be crucial to African American organization in the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout, Bradley explores the dynamics of organizational institutionalization in the midst of new growth and transformation through the Great Migration and the flowering of A. M. E. Zion churches in new African American communities on the West Coast.

First published in 1956, Rev. David S. Bradley Sr. wrote what was at the time and remains today the most thorough, scholarly history of the beginnings and growth of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Beginning with the birth of A. M. E. Zion Chapel in a humble chapel in New York City, Part 1 traces the growth of the church into a powerful and agile denomination, expanding from the settled coast into the frontiers of upstate New York and western Pennsylvania. The advancing denomination, with natural and inherited "antagonism to slavery," attracted "freedmen, seeking spiritual freedom," including the famous black Abolitionist activists—Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, who learned and honed his rhetorical skills as an exhorter in the A. M. E. Zion congregation in New Bedford, Massachusetts, under Reverend Thomas James. "No road was too pioneering no thought too liberal, for these were freedmen, seeking spiritual freedom . . . All along the Mason Dixon Line, and further West, in Ohio and Indiana, Zion Churchmen became beacon points of hope to the escaped slave and A. M. E. Zion became the church of freedom."

Excerpt from A History of the A. M. E. Zion Church, 1796-1872, Vol. 1 There 15 small doubt that a full history of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in America will ever be told for sealed eternally are the lips of her early leaders, who, in many cases, were not gifted in writing, or, because of circumstances, were unable to open their thoughts and deeds to posterity. Perhaps many of them may have deemed their work so ordinary that that which they did or desired to accomplish was merely a milestone to be reached and passed for loftier aims. At any rate, we here in 1955 have but the barest outline of their thinkings and, scattered throughout this story are missing pages and, in instances, fragments of others. But this we know, they dreamed large dreams and dared to attain them. Their drumming feet by day and night echoed more than casual ideologies for they brought to Methodism and the Protestant world of America an early battle of human rights and privileges. They showed amazing desire to widen the horizon of individual liv ing beyond freedom of body to freedom of will and expression. Where once this struggle was insignificant within the Church, the African Chapel insisted that a liberal interpretation of the Christ Way demanded democracy wherever men met for prayer and hymn. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book illuminates the professional career and private lives of J. McCants Stewart--a Reconstruction-era lawyer, minister, politician, and political activist--and his descendants over three generations, providing an epic account of an African-American family in America. (Adapted from book jacket)