ABSTRACT
The opening excerpts, the former a biographical snapshot of an African American Spiritualist3 and the latter a statement made by an African American sociologist, capture the historical predicament confronting Spiritualists of African descent. Taken together, these two citations show the sandwiching of African American Spiritualists between two compounding forces. On the one hand, these Spiritualists faced opposition in modern American Spiritualism because of their race. Their blackness, especially during the rise of institutional forms of segregation in the late nineteenth century, served as the primary reason for their ejection from the National Spiritualist Association in particular and the modern Spiritualist movement in general. On the other hand, Spiritualists of African descent, because their religious expression did not fit neatly in a traditional mold of African American Christianity, were rejected by many members in their own community. Trapped between these
two compounding forces, African American Spiritualist activities, including their doctrinal systems and ritualistic activities, within modern American Spiritualism were repressed, undergoing a forceful movement into Spiritualism’s historical unconsciousness.
