Amanda Berry Smith

Amanda Berry Smith

Amanda (Jane) Smith Berry (* 23. January 1837 in Long Green, Maryland ; † 24. February 1915 in Sebring , Florida ) was an African-American evangelist of the Holiness movement , missionary and social reformer . She was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church .

childhood

Amanda was the eldest daughter of the slaves Samuel (Sam) Berry and Miriam Matthews. Sam Berry lived on the Grindle Estate near Long Green, Baltimore County , owned by Luke Ensor. Miriam Matthews worked on the nearby Shadrach Green estate, one of the largest slave owners in the area. Even after the two got married in the 1830s, they lived separately with their respective owners. Amanda Jane Berry was born on January 23, 1837 on the Greens estate, which was managed by Shadrach Green's widow Rachel. Sam Berry planned to buy himself and his family out of slavery. As a broom-maker, he saved the necessary money. From 1840 Sam Berry lived with his wife and four children as “free colored people” in their own house with a garden and pets on Luke Ensor's land. The mother contributed to the family income as a laundress . By this time, about a quarter of the African-American population of the state of Maryland had been freed from slavery, which did not mean equal rights; on the contrary, the state was introducing increasingly restrictive legislation. When Sam Berry went to Pennsylvania to visit his brother, who had escaped from slavery, he broke a law that forbade black people from leaving the state without special permission. To avoid the threat of punishment, the Berry family moved to the state of Pennsylvania in 1845 and settled in Shrewsbury Township ( York County ). In York County the Underground Railroad network was particularly active, so that many freed slaves from Virginia and Maryland settled here and mostly earned their living as farm workers. Sam Berry and his sons also hired themselves out as farm workers, while Miriam Berry and her eldest daughter Amanda ran the household on the same farm. In 1850 the Berrys had nine children. Amanda Berry remembered her father working in the fields all day and taking escaped slaves to the nearest hideout at night. At one point, slave hunters broke into the Berry's home and threatened the family. Amanda received minimal schooling and learned to read with the help of her parents. At the age of 13 she took a job as a housemaid .

First marriage

In September 1854, at the age of 17, she married Calvine Devine. Amanda characterized her husband as saying, "He was sometimes very sensitive about religion, but when he was led by hard liquor, which I unfortunately have to say quite often, he was very secular and unreasonable." both moved to Columbia, Lancaster County . They had two children, the first of whom died early, while their daughter Mazie reached adulthood. Amanda Devine worked as a housemaid for various employers; that meant that she also lived in the respective household. Like her husband, she was not particularly religious during this time, which changed in 1855 as a result of a serious illness. Amanda Devine dated her personal conversion on March 17, 1856. She probably thought her dark skin color had been changed by an experience of light:

“Praise be to God! Radiant light seemed to completely surround me, the change was so whole and so real that I would not have been afraid if I had been black as ink, green as grass, white as snow. I went into the dining room, we had a big mirror there ... and I went over and looked at myself to see if anything had changed about the color of my skin, because something wonderful had happened inside me and it really seemed to me that it had to be visible outside. "

Two years after the outbreak of the American Civil War , African Americans were admitted as soldiers. Calvin Devine moved south with the Union Army and was lost afterwards. In September 1862, Amanda Devine borrowed money from her employer to search Maryland for her younger sister, Frances, who it was found to have been sold into slavery for ten years because she had no documents confirming her release . With the help of a neighboring Quaker and with her borrowed money, Amanda bought the 16-year-old free and they both migrated back to Lancaster County.

Mother Bethel AME Church (2014)

The African American population feared the advance of the Confederate army . Amanda Devine therefore moved to Philadelphia , where she joined the Mother Bethel AME Church, the city's oldest African American Methodist church.

Second marriage

In Bethel Church, Amanda Devine met the widower James Smith, 20 years her senior, who was serving as a preacher and deacon there. Smith's parents had already moved from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, where they could build an existence in freedom. It also meant that their children received an education. James Smith was a trained carter but was working as a waiter when he met Amanda Devine. He claimed to be seeking ordination as a pastor, which Amanda liked very much but was not meant seriously by him. They both married in 1865. They had a total of three children, all of whom died in their first year of life. The fact that Amanda felt deceived by her husband overshadowed the entire marriage, so that both partners mostly lived separately, he in the hotels where he worked as a waiter, she as a laundress and cleaner in various private households.

After the Civil War ended, the Smiths moved to New York City . James and Amanda Smith were determined to move up socially. James Smith was a Freemason member of the Prince Hall Masons and Odd Fellows lodges , and at his request Amanda was temporarily active in the Heroines of Jericho organization, which was reserved for the wives of lodge masters and was therefore quite exclusive. However, there was a lifestyle that the Smiths could not afford.

In 1868, Amanda Smith had in the Green Street Methodist Episcopal Church is a religious experience that they in Wesleyan as a traditional "second blessing" ( second blessing ) interpreted. She then began witnessing in African Methodist Episcopal Churches and gained some prominence. The more Amanda Smith felt addressed by the Sanctification Movement , the more tension developed between the couple. Amanda Smith ended her membership with the Heroines of Jericho and began dressing in Quaker style. When the second son (Amanda's fifth child) died of bronchitis in the summer of 1869 at the age of 10 months, he was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. James Smith did not show up for his child's funeral and did not help fund it, as he said he was ill - which hurt Amanda very much. However, James Smith was really seriously ill, he died in November 1869 and was buried in the same cemetery.

Evangelist of the Sanctification Movement

Frontispiece in the autobiography The story of the Lord's dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the colored evangelist (1893)

As a widow, Amanda Smith became a full-time sanctification evangelist. Since her church did not ordain women, she relied on donations for a living. Smith had a remarkable singing voice and could preach enthusiastically; Both talents helped her to numerous invitations and public appearances. She was also involved in the abstinence movement ( Woman's Christian Temperance Union ). Like other traveling evangelists, Smith used the sanctification movement vocabulary to seek social liberation. Throughout Smith's autobiography, for example, there is a constant criticism of sexism and racism, which she encountered in society, but also in her own church.

In 1878 Amanda Smith toured Great Britain and received an invitation from William B. Osborn ( Ocean Grove Camp Meeting ) to go with him as a missionary to India.

In 1882 a mission to West Africa followed. In Monrovia , Mary Sharpe introduced her to the missionary work of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Smith wrote in her autobiography that she had arrived in the land of her ancestors. But in contrast to Sharpe, Smith was not officially posted and lived on irregular, mostly inadequate donations from her supporters. There were also health problems, including malaria attacks. In her first year in Liberia , Smith traveled around, often sick, and could do little. The African American settlers were often traders and alcohol was a preferred commodity. At the end of 1883, Smith had founded an abstinence association in Monrovia called the Band of Hope , which sought to ban the import of spirits . A conflict arose between Amanda Smith and Mary Sharpe, which was carried out publicly: Sharpe accused Smith of not being interested in the “real Africans”, but only in the colonists from America; the colonists, however, treated the indigenous population worse than they had ever been treated as slaves. Indeed, Smith's view of Liberia and Africa as a whole was ambivalent.

When Amanda Smith returned to the United States in 1890, she was a celebrity. She often appeared in public and wrote her autobiography.

In 1893 she settled in Harvey, Illinois , with a plan to establish an orphanage for African American children. After years of fundraising , this facility opened in 1899, but without government funding it always remained on the verge of bankruptcy and had to close in 1918 after a fire.

Amanda Smith spent the last years of her life in an apartment provided by George E. Sebring in Sebring, Florida.

swell

• Amanda Smith: The story of the Lord's dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the colored evangelist; containing an account of her life work of faith, and her travels in America, England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and Africa, as an independent missionary . Chicago 1893, Reprint: Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Oxford University Press, New York 1988.

literature

• Adrienne M. Israel: Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist (= Studies in Evangelicalism . Volume 16). Scarecrow Press, Lanham / Oxford 1998. ISBN 0-8108-3515-0 .
• Priscilla Pope-Levison: Turn the Pulpit Loose: Two Centuries of American Woman Evangelists . Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2004, ISBN 978-1-40396529-5 .

Web links

Commons : Amanda Smith  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 10.
2. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 11 f.
3. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 13.
4. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 18.
5. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 19.
6. ^ The story of the Lord's dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the colored evangelist , Chicago 1893, p. 42.
7. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, pp. 20 f.
8. ^ The story of the Lord's dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the colored evangelist , Chicago 1893, p. 47.
9. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 22.
10. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 22 f.
11. ↑ Priscilla Pope-Levison: Turn the Pulpit Loose , New York 2004, pp. 88 f.
12. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 36.
13. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Yolanda Williams Page (Ed.): Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers , Volume 1, Greenwood Press, Westport 2007, p. 527.
14. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 50 f.
15. ↑ Estrelda Alexander: Recovering Black Theological Thought in the Writings of Early African-American Holiness-Pentecostal Leaders: Liberation Motifs in Early African-American Pentecostalism . In: Michael Wilkinson, Steven M. Studebaker (eds.): A Liberating Spirit: Pentecostals and Social Action in North America , Wipf and Stock, Eugene 2010, pp. 23–52, here p. 27.
16. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 70.
17. ^ Adrienne Israel: Amanda Berry Smith , Lanham / Oxford 1998, p. 82 f.