Browsing by Subject "African Methodist Episcopal Church"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The Bethel AME Church Archive: Partners and Participants
    (Facet Publishing, 2017) Copeland, Andrea J.
    Community archives have proven vital for giving a voice to underrepresented groups. Formal institutional archives have traditionally represented the dominant narrative in society and continue to do so, excluding access to cultural records and artifacts of underrepresented groups. Well-funded cultural heritage institutions have the infrastructures of support to provide long-term preservation and access on a global scale. Connecting community archives to this infrastructure of support is the overarching goal of my research (Copeland, 2015). How to make that connection in a way that respects the community and the purpose of the archive remains to be determined. This chapter will detail my journey with one particular community and its archive.
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    Mt. Pleasant Library: Reading among African Americans in 19th Century Rush County
    (Black History News and Notes, 2005-11) O'Bryan, Ann
    In frontier Indiana, beginning in the 1820s, several settlements of free African Americans grew and flourished. Many of the settlers came from Virginia and North Carolina, where earlier settlers, many of them Quakers, had originated. One of those settlements, called the Beech Settlement, developed in Rush County, Indiana, from the late 1820’s. Like other African Americans in antebellum U.S., the settlers of the Beech were anxious to educate themselves and their children. Indeed, the lack of access to education in the South was an important motivation for migration. Despite the difficulties and hard work of creating farms on the frontier, they early on established schools and churches in their communities. Further, the residents of the Beech went beyond teaching and organized a library that was organized, maintained, and used during the years 1842-1869. This article aims to create a portrait of a community of mid-19th century rural African American readers and users of their community library.
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    "Sparse and Multiple Traces": The Literacy Practices of African-American Pioneers in the Nineteenth Century Frontier
    (Umea, Sweden: Umea University & The Royal Skyttean Society, 2016., 2016-05-17) O'Bryan, Ann
    The Beech Settlement in central Indiana was one of several communities of African Americans that flourished in the nineteenth century. This settlement was unique in that its settlers, led by a core of highly literate individuals, organized a circulating library. The circulation records and meeting minutes of the Board of Directors survive, as well as a list of some of the books that were held in the library. This article examines the surviving documents and other primary materials to portray a community of readers, writers, orators, and educators, who, although denied legal access to education until their migration, had learned to read and write, and had developed the skills to create a thriving community of readers.