Abstract
After traveling for nearly a week by sea, Rev. and Mrs. Brown arrived in New York City in the midst of a fierce snowstorm. The story of the Harlem Unitarian Church is about the combined effort of a few brave souls to bring about something the world had never seen before. What exactly that “something” was, however, is subject to any number of interpretations. Although Ethelred Brown had struggled to establish a predominantly Black Unitarian ministry back home in his native Jamaica for several years, his attempts were of no avail. So Rev. Brown and his wife, Ella, decided to leave the Caribbean and make a fresh start in the United States. The couple secured modest funds from a British Unitarian women’s mission group that allowed them to book passage aboard a ship setting sail from Kingston, Jamaica, on Saturday, February 21, 1920, headed for Harlem. Meanwhile, future HUC members such as Richard B. Moore, Frank R. Crosswaith, Grace Campbell, and W.A. Domingo had already been in America for a number of years. Each of them sought to stake their respective claims to what the United States had to offer: a better quality of living, greater social mobility, and an increased sense of individual potential, among other things
I am a poor pilgrim o f sorrow. I’m tossed in this wide world alone. No hope have I for tomorrow. I’ve started to make heaven my home. Sometimes I am tossed and driven. Lord, sometimes I don’t know where to roam. [But] I’ve heard o f a city called Heaven. I’ve started to make [Heaven] my home.
—Traditional Gospel Song, “City Called Heaven”1
In the history of New York, the significance of the name has changed from Dutch to Irish to Jewish to Negro. Of these changes, the last has come most swiftly. Throughout colored America, from Massachusetts to Mississippi, and across the continent to Los Angeles and Seattle, its name, which as late as fifteen years ago had scarcely been heard, now stands for the Negro metropolis. Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious, and the talented of the whole Negro world; for the lure of it has reached down to every island of the Carib sea and has penetrated even into Africa.
—James Weldon Johnson, “The Making of Harlem”2
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Notes
“A City Called Heaven”, in Songs of Zion (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982), 135.
James Weldon Johnson, “The Making of Harlem”, Survey Graphic, 6:6 (March 1925), 635.
Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 20.
James H. Cone,TheSpirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 82.
Ethelred Brown, “The Harlem Unitarian Church”, (n.p., n.d.), 2, Egbert Ethelred Brown Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.
British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 87th Annual Report (May 30, 1912), 9.
One Hundred Years, 1825–1925, British and Foreign Unitarian Association Centenary (London: Lindsey Press, 1925), 14.
British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 88th Annual Report (June 6, 1913), 19.
Cliff Reed, “Unitarianism in Jamaica: A Blighted Flower”, The Inquirer 17 (January 1998), 6.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“Colonial and Foreign Work”, British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 86th Annual Report (June 8, 1911), 22–23.
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1951), 3.
Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1996), 1.
Wilfred A. Domingo, “Gift of the Black Tropics”, in Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 349.
See also John A. Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1955; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Maurice R. Davie, A Constructive Immigration Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 7.
Ira DeA. Reid, The Negro Immigrant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 34.
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 1–26.
Wilfred A. Samuels, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture, 1917–1929 (Boulder, CO: Belmont Books, 1977), 1.
Nell I. Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: Norton, 1987), 8.
Paul S. Boyer, Clifford Clark, Sandra M. Hawley, Joseph Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, vol. 2, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 466.
August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 69–82, 161–63; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm Too Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1979); Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1970; Penguin Books, 1994), xii.
Ibid., 96.
“Negro Republicans of Virginia Plan National Protest against Lily Whiteism as Practiced by Republicans”, New York Age, August 6, 1921.
See also Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (New York: Arno Press, 1969); William M. Tuttle Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970); Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001); and Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002).
Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902; Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969), 77–78.
Howard P. Chudacoff, “Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America”, Review in American History 10:4 (December 1982), 107.
John Henrik Clarke, “Introduction”, in John Henrik Clarke, ed. Harlem: A Community in Transition (New York: Citadel Press, 1970), 3.
Ibid., 4.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; New York: International Publishers, 1948); Charles Fourier, Designs for Utopia (New York: Schocken Books, 1971); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879; New York: Robert Scholkenbach Foundation, 1937); William Dean Howells, Traveler from Altruia (Edinburgh: Douglas, 1894); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1887; Boston: Houghton, 1926).
Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xi.
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford Press, 1991), 13.
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967; New York: Quill, 1984), 12.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Black North: A Social Study (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 41.
Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 79.
Carl Horton Pierce, New Harlem, Past and Present (New York: New Harlem Publishing, 1903), 129.
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 33.
Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 90.
61 Ibid., 6–7.
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© 2008 Juan M. Floyd-Thomas
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Floyd-Thomas, J.M. (2008). Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow: Rev. Ethelred Brown and the Roots of Black Humanism in Harlem. In: The Origins of Black Humanism in America. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615823_2
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