ABSTRACT
As the first known Black female Methodist Episcopal preacher, Zilpha Elaw Shum gained celebrity status in the 1800s; yet, her trans-Atlantic itinerant story is virtually unknown, her major contribution to American religious revivalism is untold, and her group burial plot in London is unmarked. Typically, readers place free antebellum Black women in one of two camps: abolitionists or fugitive slaves, but Elaw was neither. Her evangelism, when women were not allowed to preach, and her itinerancy, which placed her life in danger at every moment, afforded Elaw a measure of freedom about which most people of her race, class and gender could only dream. But stories that do not fit recognizable models are often erased from the record, becoming lives that don’t matter.
Elaw’s defiant ministry models how the evangelism of pre–Civil War women furthered large-scale social reform alongside their own individual, domestic desires for freedom of movement. In this way, women helped to shape growing social rebellions that were religious, racial, and gendered. This chapter highlights Elaw’s international fame and takes up the challenge of recovering a woman who was larger than life but later misrecognized as inconsequential. The press coverage of Elaw from 1840 to 1865 illustrates that in her lifetime, Elaw was hyper-visible as a Black body on public display even as she was rendered invisible as a transnational evangelist and major contributor to the rapid spread of Methodism in the United States and Britain.
