Pan-Africanism
Savi Krumenauer Pan Africanism is an intellectual movement worldwide the desires to spread courage and bonds of strength through solidarity between all people of African decent. It is an anti slavery and anti colonial way among blacks of Africa through the 19th century. The views changed throughout decades, and represents the complexities of black political and intellectual thought for two hundred years. The movement focus changes often whether it’s on politics, organization, ideology, or culture. It is a reflection of many political views. The idea of Africans on the continent and the diaspora , to share not just the same history, but very likely a similar destiny, the interconnected pasts and futures has created many forms, especially political institutions. The Africans gave their people their religion for their first manifestations. From the 1780’s in response to the segregation in which churches, the Free Blacks organization in the U.S. established their own churches. They were tired of being cramped into church galleries and forced to follow the churches rules even though the blacks weren’t allowed to be buried in the white churches cemeteries. The Free African Society was started by a young black minister Richard Allen and a black clergyman Absalom Jones in 1787. The organization held religious services and mutual aid for the members of Free Africans and their descendants in Philadelphia. Jones accepted a job offer as the position of being pastor of the Free Africans Society’s African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794. Following the leadership of Jones, Allen had the desire to establish a Methodist congregation to build the communities of blacks, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church the started in Southern Philadelphia. The church had many different assignments, including being away station for the underground railroad. Allen supported many by helping them emigrate to Haiti and America. The impulse indeed led almost six hundred blacks from Philadelphia and other coastal cities to Haiti. A community that descended from Philadelphia to Haiti is still living in Samanai, a very small city on a peninsula in the Northeast of the Dominican Republic. Their desire to keep their identity as Africans was also brought forth when they practiced their religion of enslaved people in the Americas, who were the ones that developed syncretic religions that brought African and Christian beliefs together. Which gave groth to the cities such as Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Candomble in Brazil. The people who were enslaved in the U.S. did not seem to expand in the diversity in their religions, but their informed African practices of religion helped cherish a sense of identity. The Haitian Revolution started and was organized through Vodun, which inspired enslaved ministers in the south to start leadership or to join slave revolts, just as Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey did. |
Absalom Jones
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