ABSTRACT
Like too many other informational arenas, a recent Public Broadcasting System program, “The African Americans,” reported on the early origins of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and completely excluded the women who participated in the earliest expressions of that denomination. Similarly, women have yet to be fully incorporated into leadership structures of U.S. Black Church life, but there are notable changes. There are currently more women in these positions than at any other time in the country’s history, with most of the accomplishments achieved since the last half of the 20th century. The exception was Bishop Ida Robinson’s 1924 founding of the Mount Sinai Holy Church in America in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bishop Robinson organized this new denomination specifically for preaching women to have a legitimate ecclesiastical home. Between 1924 and1969, the Mount Sinai Holy Church ordained four female leaders, including Bishop Mary E. Jackson. In 1977 in the U.S., Pauli Murray became the first African American woman to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. The U.S. United Methodist Church ordained as Bishop, Leontine T.G. Kelly, the first African American woman to that position of a mainline denomination. She served from 1984 until her retirement in 1988. Bishop Kelly died June 12, 2012, at the age of 92.
All of these are interesting facts, if we were merely in search of a list of female accomplishments or other such details. But isolated facts tell us nothing about the context, the historical, socio-political, theoretical, and/or theological foundations upon which the accomplishments were realized. Nor does a listing of facts speak to the collective struggles U.S. African descendant women had to overcome in order for this small number of individuals to acquire positions some two and half centuries after their ancestors were imported to the Americas. My charge here is to reclaim women’s collective struggles and accomplishments in the African Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States as a case study of power, church, and African descendant women.
