A Black Presbyterian In A Grudging World
by George M. Apperson
Presbyterian Voice
Synod of Living Waters
Volume 14 No. 6
February 2004
Edward Blyden was born on St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies, in a
predominantly English-speaking Sephardic Jewish community where he and
his family were members of the Dutch Reformed Church. When an American
Presbyterian, John P. Knox, became minister of the church in 1845, he
recognized Blyden's unusual intellectual ability and began tutoring
him. Sensitive, religious and ambitious, Blyden decided to become a
Presbyterian minister himself, with his parents' approval.
Knox realized that he needed theological training and arranged a trip
to the United States. But because he was black, schools, including
Rutgers, his pastor's alma mater, rejected him. In New York, with John
B. Pinny, a Princeton Seminary graduate and former missionary to
Liberia, he attended Thanksgiving Day services in 1850 and never
forgot hearing "a political discourse having reference to the Fugitive
Slave Law recently enacted." In justifying the law, the minister
asserted that "the efforts of those who were endeavoring to elevate
Africans in America, were, and always would be, fruitless," and cited
the racist version of the curse of Noah as irreversible proof. This
idea haunted Blyden during this long career as an African intellectual
and he undertook to confute it in his writings. He found Psalm 68:31
deeply relevant, from an early poem to later powerful sermons;
"Ethiopia," it promised, "shall soon stretch out her hands unto God."
Blyden was eighteen when the New York Colonization Society sponsored
his emigration to Liberia. To Dr. Pinney he wrote, "I want to see
Africa, from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean, brought under Christian
influence." Passing through Philadelphia on his way to sail from
Baltimore, he was escorted by an official of the Society because, as
he remembered, "I was in great fear of being seized as a slave under
the operations of the Fugitive Slave law which was at that time
causing great excitement in the country."
He arrived in Monrovia in January 1851, and Harrison Ellis was no
longer minister of the Presbyterian Church or principal of the
Alexander High School. Preaching without formal theological education
and teaching without academic training had broken Ellis's moral
resolve and his Alabama Presbytery voted to suspend him. David A.
Wilson, a graduate of Princeton Seminary, had replaced him. Wilson saw
Blyden's unusual ability and secured support from Americans for his
full-time study. Wilson tutored him in Latin and Greek, Mathematics
and Theology, while Blyden, on his own, studied Hebrew which he had
heard spoken on St. Thomas. It seems likely that the man he called
"Father Harrison," whose knowledge of Hebrew astonished Alabama
Presbyters, helped and encouraged him. Blyden eventually became fluent
in eight languages, including Arabic.
When Wilson was absent due to ill-health, Blyden filled his place as
principal, while he was also preparing for the Presbyterian ministry.
His literary skills were developing and after a military expedition
against native chiefs who were causing "carnage and bloodshed," his
detailed accounts were published in the Liberia Herald. When the
editor resigned in 1855, he was appointed to take his place. At twenty-
one, already an accomplished public speaker, Blyden was chosen as
orator for Liberian Independence Day in Monrovia and "in this happiest
style claimed the attention of all who were so fortunate as to be
within hearing."
Ordained in 1858, he succeeded Wilson as head of the Alexander High
School but the Missions Board in New York refused him funds for
further education. Blyden turned to sympathetic Englishmen and
initiated a remarkable correspondence with William E. Gladstone, among
others. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime
Minister, was a noted Classical scholar. He responded generously to
his request for books, especially for Liberia College when Blyden was
professor of Classics from 1862 to 1871.
Sincere patriotism made Blyden an obvious choice to fill political and
diplomatic posts for his country. He served on occasions as ambassador
to the Court of St. James and represented Liberia on missions to the
United States. Washington, he thought, was a "disagreeable place,"
with nothing worth seeing except government buildings, the Smithsonian
and the Observatory. "To a colored man," he wrote during the American
Civil War, "the sight of these is not sufficient to requite him for
the indignities he suffers in getting there, and insults he must
endure while there." When his description of the "Mixed Races in
Liberia" (not intended for publication) was issued by the Smithsonian,
a mob in Monrovia tried to lynch him. Rescued by a friend, he fled to
Sierra Leone.
Blyden's serious dislike of mixed-race Africans dominated his ethnic
perceptions. He believed that there was a distinctive African
personality and that racial purity was essential for the emergence of
coherent and stable political organizations. He came to support a
native church organized by Africans and independent of the missionary
influence that was dominant at the founding of Liberia. His tolerance
of polygamy, traditional in Africa but abhorrent to western
Christians, was prompted by his uncritical appreciation of customs
ingrained in their culture. A sympathetic understanding of African
Muslims prompted acrid criticism from traditional Christians but the
complexity of his mind can still be appreciated by reading his
Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Edinburgh, 1887).
What might this extraordinary youth from the West Indies have achieved
had he not experienced the trauma of American racism? That this man
was born more than a century ahead of his time seems evident. But his
career may lead us to reflect on the social challenges of the twenty-
first century and the price of intolerance in the American experience.
Education remains a golden key that unlocks human potential. And as
Presbyterians, we need to find courage to translate the words of the
Apostle Paul to Philemon into personal conviction, "that our goodness
might not be by compulsion but of our own free will." (Philemon, verse
14)
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