As nice a copy as one could hope for. This collection of sermons and orations aren’t limited to religious matters: Johnson addresses issues such as political rights, military service, Black women, and journalism.
Born in Toronto, educated in Buffalo and later Wayland Seminary (Richmond, Va.), William Bishop Johnson (1858–1907) was a pivotal figure in the political rise of the Baptist Church, the largest denomination among African Americans. He helped found the American Baptist National Convention, an independent network of Black churches. Renamed the National Baptist Convention in 1895, it became the largest African American organization in the country. He was also editor of the National Baptist Magazine.
“In 1883 Dr. William Bishop Johnson accepted the call to the pastorate which, notwithstanding its nearly forty years of struggle, had been reduced to a membership of less than one hundred. During Dr. Johnson’s pastorate a church edifice was erected in 1895 at a cost of $75,000, one of ‘the largest and most imposing in the city. An outstanding feature of Dr. Johnson’s administration was the organization of a Sunday School Lyceum in 1885 which was one of the most popular literary organizations in the Capitol, meeting Sunday afternoons, when there were discussions of some foremost topic by representative thinkers of both sexes and races” (Cromwell).
The Scourging of a Race and Other Sermons and Addresses gathers twenty-six of Johnson’s pieces from the 1880s into the early twentieth century. Among the most forceful is “National Perils,” delivered in 1889, which condemns the injustice of American racism and predicts the end of the passive Black citizen. “What we call the patient, humble Negro will have gone,” Johnson warned, replaced by men ready to defend their rights—even, if necessary, by converting “every inch” of their land “into a fort with Winchester and Gatling guns to keep of the wildcats and crows.” He further identifies socialism, intemperance, and illiteracy as obstacles to Black progress, while praising Black Americans as “industrious, good-natured, honest—for his honesty has been tested both as a slave and free man.”
In the lead sermon, “The Scourging of a Race,” Johnson argues that African Americans are being tested by adversity—God’s “scourge”—as they struggle against racism and inequality. He envisions racial and spiritual unity through the gospel, likening Black Americans to the Israelites in the forty years since emancipation.
Johnson often notes where and when each address was first delivered. Not all are sermons: some examine African American military service (“Robert G. Shaw” —delivered at the Boston dedication of Shaw’s monument—and “The Negro in War and Peace”), political rights (“Citizenship, Suffrage and the Negro”), and journalism (“The Religious and Secular Press Compared”). In “Ruth—A Noble Type of True Womanhood,” delivered before the Household of Ruth, the female auxiliary of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, Johnson quotes from Milton and Gail Hamilton while honouring the moral force of Black womanhood.
Scarce in the trade with just a single copy at Swann in 2000.
Not in Work, Blockson Catalogue, or LCP, Afro-Americana; Cromwell, J.W., “The First Negro Churches in the District of Columbia” in The Journal of Negro History, Vol.7, No.1 (Jan., 1922), p.82n.
