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Abstract
The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a black Church founded in the United States in 1816, was first established in eastern Haiti when over 6,000 black freemen emigrated from the United States to Hispaniola between 1824 and 1825. Almost a century later, the AME Church grew rapidly in the Dominican Republic as West Indians migrated to the Dominican southeast to work on sugar plantations. This article examines the links between African-American immigrant descendants, West Indians, and U.S.-based AME leaders between the years 1899-1916. In focusing on Afro-diasporic exchange in the Church and the hardships missionary leaders faced on the island, the article reveals the unequal power relations in the AME Church, demonstrates the significance of the southeast to Dominican AME history, and brings the Dominican Republic into larger discussions of Afro-diasporic exchange in the circum-Caribbean.
Keywords
Dominican Republic - Protestantism - blacks - migrants - missionaries - United States - history
In 1916, the African Methodist Episcopal (ame) Church-a historically black Church founded in 1816 in the United States-was one of several Protestant denominations growing rapidly in the Dominican Republic as thousands of laborers from the British Caribbean migrated to sugar plantations in southeastern regions of the country.1 Unlike the Episcopal, Moravian, and Methodist denominations, the a m e Church was unique because black ministers led ame congregations and the denomination's bishops were African-Americans in the United States, not white Europeans or Americans.2 The a m e Church was also the oldest Protestant denomination in eastern Hispaniola, having first been established in 1830 by black colonists who emigrated from the United States to Haiti between the years 1824 and 1825 at a time when the entire island was under Haitian rule (1822-44).3 At the turn of the century, the ame Church provided an organizational structure in which descendants of African-American colonists along with more recent British Caribbean migrants (West Indians) maintained and developed ties to African-American institutions in the United States.4 These groups coalesced around common cultural markers (the English language and Protestant religion) and a shared commitment to the principles of racial uplift and self-determination that were at the center of the history and contemporary rhetoric of the a m e Church and its black Protestant leaders.
Despite the a m e...