Spiritualizing Black Sovereignty

Abstract This article recounts the first stages of an 1890 lawsuit between the historic African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and descendants of African American emigrants in the Dominican Republic. During the dispute, both sides relied on the history of mass Black emigration from the United States to Haiti in the 1820s. The two narratives tied this history of emigration to two distinct religious bodies. On one side stood the AME denomination; on the other were emigrants’ descendants who self-identified as the “Protestant Congregation of Santo Domingo.” Emigrant descendants argued that their religion tied them to the birth of the Dominican nation, a majority Catholic country under dictatorship whose antiblack ruling class disavowed the nation’s African heritage and historic ties to Haiti. The lawsuit exemplified the challenges of Black identity politics and international racial alliance building in the late nineteenth century post-emancipation Atlantic world. More importantly, it demonstrated how some Dominicans drew from a long history of Black religious-political thought to navigate new iterations of global antiblackness, authoritarianism, and empire, charting a path forward for themselves and the Dominican nation. Their spiritualization of Black sovereignty demanded historical interpretation, and this act of liberation depended on their belief in otherwise possibilities.