The Reverend Jennie Johnson and African Canadian Religious History
Today's guest post is by Nina
Reid-Maroney, Associate Professor of History at Huron University College
at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. Her
book,The Reverend Jennie
Johnson and African Canadian History, 1868-1967, was published in
the Gender and Race in American History series at the University of Rochester
Press in 2013.
Jennie Johnson (1868-1967) was an African
Canadian Baptist preacher, the first woman in Canada called as an ordained
minister “publicly consecrated to SACRED SERVICE, “ as her certificate of
ordination proclaimed, “authorized to preach the Gospel, administer its
ordinances, assume its responsibilities and share the honors of the Christian
Ministry.” Born in a rural black abolitionist settlement in Chatham
Township (near the present-day town of Dresden, Ontario) Jennie Johnson lived
through a century, from the era of Reconstruction to the modern civil rights
movement. She co-founded a Baptist congregation at the age of sixteen, received
her theological education at Wilberforce University in the 1890s, founded
churches in Ontario, established an inner city mission in Flint, and was an
active member of the Michigan Freewill Baptist Convention-- one of the only
black women in this predominantly white association in the early years of the
20th century.
Her ordination preceded by
a generation the ordination milestone for women in the liberal United Church of
Canada, and placed the Reverend Johnson in a position of religious and civic
authority years before women in Canada had the right to vote, before the first
woman in Canada was appointed magistrate, before the Privy Council’s decision
that women were indeed to be considered “persons” under the British North
America Act.
Despite this extraordinary life, Johnson’s
has largely been a legacy of silence. The “neat brick church” that Johnson
built in 1915 remains at its rural crossroads in Southwestern Ontario, but the
church’s cornerstone bears the name of someone else. My introduction to
Jennie Johnson came from a small notation on a Black History Month poster
circulated by the North American Black Historical Museum of Amherstburg. The
realisation that I had grown up a few miles from her birthplace without ever
having heard her name was the beginning of The Reverend Jennie Johnson
and African Canadian History, 1868-1967.
Viewing African Canadian and African
American history through the lens of Johnson’s experience opens a striking
landscape, and fresh ways of looking at familiar figures—including Mary Ann
Shadd Cary, or Josiah Henson, Johnson’s neighbour—who are often expected to
stand in for the whole of African Canadian experience. Johnson’s complicated
and cross-border life raises new questions about the intersections of racial
and gender identity, and religion. It also reveals the way such intersections
formed and re-formed to create a regional black culture across what Afua Cooper
calls the “fluid frontier” of the Great Lakes borderlands.[1]
Steven Hahn has argued that free black
communities in the antebellum North were connected, not just to one another,
but to the culture of slavery, through “circuits of communication and
experience, interconnected processes of negotiation and agitation, [and] much
deeper wells of aspiration and practice” than is generally acknowledged. Hahn
argues for the importance of free northern settlements as “important political
meeting grounds and as sites for the construction of new black politics” where
fugitives from slavery, as well as those in “putative freedom,” from wide
backgrounds and of varied experience, forged new paths of resistance and
agitated for slavery’s demise.[2] Applied
to the Canadian setting, a similar argument centered on free black communities,
white supporters, and their work across racial lines can transform our
understanding of antislavery ideology, politics, and action. Jennie
Johnson was the product of a distinctive culture of liberation that
characterised African Canadian settlement and antislavery work in exile.
The community to which Johnson’s
grandparents were drawn in the 1840s was both a remote backwater of the British
Empire, and a central point of connection in the transatlantic antislavery
movement. In the nineteenth century, the language of redemption in the
“promised land” of Canada was so highly charged that it required no explanation
beyond itself, even when the promise remained unrealised. Since Johnson’s time,
however, the religious and ideological world at the heart of African Canadian
settlement has all but disappeared in historical accounts that begin and end
with the Underground Railroad. One of the consequences of recovering
Jennie Johnson’s story is the restoration of a more complicated African
Canadian religious and intellectual history, in which Christian egalitarianism
provided strong sinews of connection between the abolitionist foundations of
nineteenth-century and the movement for racial justice in the twentieth.
In addition to highlighting the importance
of a cross-border African Canadian history beyond 1865, Johnson’s story invites
a revisiting of the ordination question, and its potential to reorient women’s
relationship to Christianity in ways that face the paradox of its conservative
tendencies, and its transformative power. A life spent defying what
she once called “the coldness of manmade regulations” gave Johnson an
understanding of the carefully interwoven boundaries of race, gender, and
national identity. She saw her ordination as the power to cut through those
boundaries and to make her own way. In her time, Johnson’s
ordination to the Christian ministry was a revolution nurtured in the
straitlaced heart of Baptist orthodoxy; in our time, knowing about her
ordination helps to overturn long-accepted assumptions about women,
Christianity, and race in North American history.
[1] Afua Cooper, “The
Fluid Frontier: Blacks and the Detroit River Region, 1789-1854, A Focus on
Henry Bibb,” Canadian Review of American Studies 30, 2:
129-149.
[2] Steven Hahn, The
Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard
University Press, 2009), 42.
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