The African Methodist Episcopal Church Media and Racial Discourse, 1880-1900

During the age of "new" imperialism at the turn of the century, several African American religious leaders like those in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church asserted that the major obstacle to liberty and equality in the United States and across the globe was racism. In the United States, the age marked an increase in racism that resulted in racial violence, discrimination, and disfranchisement and provoked a measured discourse on race and racial differences and attitudes. In a global sense, racism played an intrinsic role in the history of imperialism as American and European imperialists used prevalent racist attitudes and theories to justify the use of their military and technological advantage to subjugate people of color throughout the world. Imperialists relied on scientific and biblical "evidence" to produce an array of distortions and falsehoods that attempted to verify the inferiority of darker people. Foremost among the scientific distortions was the application of Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection to the social development of people, whom scientists and scholars ordered into racial, gender, and class categories. Scholars formulated hierarchial evolutionary scales that placed white people or subcategories of white people at the top and black people at the bottom or below the bottom. They manipulated the burgeoning social sciences of history, geography, anthropology, and psychology to confirm their biological biases. Those like British sociologist Herbert Spencer and his disciple, William Graham Sumner, a founder of American sociology, maintained that conflict between people was good because "natural law" would select those with superior institutions and culture to survive and dominate. Such attitudes permeated the psyche of American society, and newspapers such as the Baltimore American often declared that "It is the same old law of the survival of the fittest. The weak must bend to the strong and today the American race is the sturdiest, the noblest on earth." American and European imperialism fed upon such logic of white supremacy.