Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist.

Lindley, Susan Hill

Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist. By Adrienne M. Israel. Studies in Evangelicalism 16. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1998. xvi + 192 pp. n.p.

Adrienne Israel's Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist is welcome as the first full-length critical biography of a woman who, "[w]ithout official church sanction or financial support, ... emerged from obscurity and near destitution to become one of the nineteenth century's most important Christian evangelists (1). While Smith is not as well known as perhaps she should be, neither has she been completely neglected in recent years, which have seen two republications of her 1893 autobiography--most recently in 1988 as a volume in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers--and several short but valuable biographical sketches. Nevertheless, Israel's work offers an important complement to these sources.

On one level, Amanda Berry Smith's life and Israel's biography deserve attention for sheer human drama. Born as a slave in 1837, Amanda experienced a childhood as a free black during the years of growing abolitionist activity but also two unhappy marriages, which forced her to support herself and her child by exhausting and poorly paid domestic service. But like Jarena Lee before her, the death of her husband freed Amanda to follow her call from God with stunning success as an evangelist whose work was hailed on four continents. At another level, Smith's interests and accomplishments set her in the midst of several major religious developments of the second half of the nineteenth century in America. She was, first and foremost, an evangelist, a Christian whose life was driven by her own conversion and sense that God had called her directly to the work. She was an active advocate of the second blessing of sanctification, part of America's Holiness Movement from her acquaintance with Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday meetings to her prominence on the camp meeting circuit. She preached (even if she did not always call it that, being a woman) to literally thousands of blacks and whites in churches and camp meetings, for the early years of the Holiness Movement were less racially segregated than most of the rest of American churches and society at the time. While she was never ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church of which she was a lifelong member, her own success as a preacher and religious leader helped pave the way for official public leadership roles and ministries for Methodist women. Following two years of evangelism in England, Smith went to India (eighteen months) and then to Liberia (eight years) as a missionary before returning to the U.S. in 1890. The results of alcohol export to Africa, which she had observed as a missionary, only reinforced her devotion to the temperance cause, begun in the early years of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Israel's portrait does justice to a remarkable and complex woman, and the author's admiration is both clear and understandable. Yet admiration does not prevent her from critical assessment. A significant contribution of this study is the attention given to Smith's later years in Chicago, after the publication of her autobiography. The orphanage for African-American children Smith founded and tried to support through her evangelistic tours and her writing, as well as through donations from sympathetic friends, was both commendable and needed, but it was not particularly successful. Its operation was hampered not only by incompetent employees and lack of funds but also by Smith's own inexperience and lack of ability as an administrator. Her relations with some of her employees also revealed the internalized ambivalence of a woman who tried to live in two racial worlds. On the one hand, Smith's faith insisted on the oneness of all God's children and on a celebration of the "royal black" of her part of God's creation; on the other hand, despite good experiences and support from some white people, Smith was no stranger to the realities of American racism. And like many figures who try to bridge two worlds, Smith was at times misunderstood and rejected by both. As Israel writes, "Enduring the label of a `white-folks' nigger,' she felt the sting of implications from other African Americans that she was pandering to whites in order to enjoy the privileges of wealth and status that came with associating with the rich.... At camp meetings indignant whites sometimes questioned her right to speak to a white audience and she was snubbed and even barred from some white churches in the early years of her career" (156).

A final contribution of this full-length biography is Israel's extensive essay on sources, which lists primary and secondary works, collections, papers, and related documents. Israel has used such resources as census records, maps, and public documents to paint effective and vivid pictures of some of the less familiar historical contexts of Smith's life, such as the community of free blacks in Pennsylvania during Amanda's childhood, when their home became a station on the Underground Railroad, or the poverty of Greenwich Village after the war, when Amanda worked as a washerwoman in the years before her emergence as one of the best-known evangelists of her generation.

Susan Hill Lindley St. Olaf College