Lessons about Race and Power in the Branch Theological Seminary

As much as pursuing theological education affirmed Black humanity, dignity, and self-determination, it also prompted white people's efforts to control Black men. This language of control coincided with the political rhetoric of Black people being unprepared for autonomous political leadership—only in this instance such “concern” was couched in the language of secularity and excess.Footnote ²³ Such controlling attitudes and projects of the schools established theological school as a site where politics and race were displayed and enacted and where students honed political responses to freedom. The attitudes of the diocese in establishing the school points to just this development.

The Virginia diocese's decision to establish a theological school is an example of how white churchmen foreclosed black independence based on spurious claims of black incapacity for leadership. While theological education was relatively limited in its availability, especially when compared with the common school, white Episcopal Church leaders focused their attention on deciding what the relationship between churches and schools should be as they tried to navigate the new landscape of race relations. The BTS was part of the Episcopal Church's missionary plan. The Virginia diocese decided to create the BTS in 1878 in response to a possible influx of black church members from the Zion Union Apostolic Church, a predominantly black denomination based in the southside of Virginia, and as an answer to the nearly complete exodus of Black people from the church. The diocese recognized the desire to keep the integrity of the congregations while providing opportunities for training the ministers. Since the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (PETS; the flagship school located in Alexandria, Virginia) did not accept Black students, the Virginia diocese and Board of the PETS decided to create the BTS and locate it at the St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, where a normal school was already operating.Footnote ²⁴

The Virginia diocese's project aligned with the General Convention of the Episcopal Church's emerging strategies for catechizing the freedpeople that emphasized education. Submitting to the notion that they could not effectively build churches among Black people, the General Convention turned to establishing schools as its formal outreach mechanism to the freedpeople.Footnote ²⁵ This was similar to the Congregational Church behind the American Missionary Association, which also determined to focus on school rather than church-building. Though some white churchmen suggested that opening churches was the way to win back Black members,Footnote ²⁶ the General Convention saw the real deficiency in that outreach plan—that there were no Black people in their churches—and instead promoted schools.

The education plan had at its core an attempt to curtail independent black worship on the basis of black incapacity—an idea that was echoed in the political sphere. Though schools were the chosen missionary tool, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Church worried that the curriculum of these schools was too secular and recommended that the schools only be established in connection with churches.Footnote ²⁷ Secularity might also have been read as moving too much toward black freedom, given how church leaders like Bishop Thomas Atkinson (1804–1881) of North Carolina argued for schools and churches to stem the tide of what they considered to be disorderly religious development among Black people. He reported that Black folks were improvising religion, and that their leaders were ill-suited to the tasks and responsibilities of leadership:

That this discussion of “fanaticism” and excess was twinned with the concern for church schools, and that the discussion took place as black political engagement was increasing, suggests that the actual underlying concerns and aims of Episcopal educational practices were to control black political development. Yet, rather than say this outright, the Episcopal Church couched the idea of political control in the spiritual worry that these freed Black people were being “left emphatically ‘as sheep without a shepherd,’ after falling prey to irreligion and error, and sometimes, it is said, to the grossest forms of superstition.”Footnote ²⁹ Episcopal church leaders likewise expressed concern that Black people were unwittingly transforming the white-initiated worship style—the implication being that Black people did not know what they were doing and that the shepherds should be white church leaders. They depicted the leaders that Black people chose as raced and outside of the ministry of the church. And in their view, what was most noxious was the style of worship—excessive, fanatical, and out of control. This characterization dovetailed with the shift in viewing black religion after Emancipation from what humanized Black people to what excluded them—from romantic racialism to black degeneration.Footnote ³⁰ The religious and spiritual landscape was yet another venue of arguing for black incapacity and lack of political savvy. Unsurprisingly, the othering and exoticizing of black religious practice kept Black men from being admitted to the flagship seminary and led to the formation of the BTS.

Alongside the formal curriculum, which varied according to student skill, preparedness, and interest, the co-curriculum communicated the values of social inequality evident in the ways some students were embraced and others, like Bragg, were exiled. The BTS was initially established alongside the St. Stephen's Episcopal Normal and Industrial School under the leadership of the Reverend Giles B. Cooke, former Confederate aide to General Robert E. Lee.Footnote ³¹ The Reverend Thomas Spencer, recent graduate of the PETS in Alexandria (1875), was appointed to oversee the theological curriculum. This co-location was significant because some of the first students needed both the fundamental education that the church school offered and the more advanced training that deacons and priests required for ordination. Consequently, Cooke played an important role in the education of some students—like James Solomon Russell—even though the two schools were intended to function as separate entities. Students understood this, for they made a point of underscoring the distinctive teaching responsibilities of Cooke and Spencer in their recollections of the school.Footnote ³²

The fact that Cooke transcended the boundaries between the common and theological schools shows how the co-curriculum of discipline and control was enacted. While the formal curriculum hewed to the subjects and skills ordained clergy needed to minister in the tradition, the records of two students’ experiences shed light on the co-curriculum. James Solomon Russell recounted a nurturing relationship with the Reverend Cooke, one through which he learned the details of church administration by being chosen as Cooke's assistant, practically from his first day enrolling in the school. Yet as nurturing and informative as his relationship with Cooke was, Russell was also the recipient of Cooke's discipline. Russell reported that one time he was late to service because he went to minister to a bereaved family. On Russell's return, Cooke instructed him via a parable about legislators who, despite the loss of electrical power, remained at their stations and lit candles for light. The message: No matter what else may beckon, do not abandon your post—a lesson that Russell readily embraced. Cooke seemed to have appreciated this response, and Russell reported that they maintained a long friendship throughout the years, even if a critic characterized the relationship as strictly paternalistic.Footnote ³³

Bragg had a much rockier relationship with the Reverend Cooke than did Russell. Recall that, within a year of enrolling, Bragg was kicked out of school for not being “humble enough.” Apparently, Cooke believed Bragg's infraction was not of the sort that could be instructed via parable or mentorship, and so the only recourse was expulsion. Bragg discusses the events circumspectly, and so the instigating event is unclear. But the result was not. Besides expelling Bragg, Cooke continued to criticize Bragg's attitude, standing in the way of Bragg getting an appointment to a church by refusing to give a recommendation.

Cooke's expulsion of Bragg for not being sufficiently humble echoed the critiques that black worship was too exotic and frenzied. Like those worshippers, Bragg was outside of the box that Cooke had drawn for him and thus was the object of discipline. Cooke apparently took the same exception to Bragg's cousin, David Cain, who was also expelled for lacking humility.Footnote ³⁴ It is notable that two students with familial claims to the church's origin were found to lack humility.

But perhaps the larger lesson comes from viewing the cases of Russell and Bragg together—that some behaviors would not be tolerated and would instead be disciplined and controlled. This might be read as a lesson in subservience if Bragg's pursuit of the ministry ended there, but it merely strengthened Bragg's resolve to pursue his calling and his sense of his rights on the basis of common humanity and skill.

Though Cooke's teaching and mentoring enacted the co-curriculum of enforcing social inequality, Bragg took from them a different set of lessons about race and inequality: that education could erode barriers at the highest levels. Bragg's writings suggest that he was motivated by the kind of advancement that education afforded. He also mentions the Black students who successfully maneuvered through these institutions to places of leadership in the church—students from St. Stephen's Episcopal Church School who went on to study at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and another who went on to become representatives at the Texas diocesan council meeting. According to Bragg, “In the history of missions we have this unusual picture of these two men sitting together in two successive General Conventions representing the diocese of Texas. One, [of] the very best Virginia blood and highest social standing; the other a former illiterate slave whose father had been employed by the former.”Footnote ³⁵ What better indicator than this of how theological education challenged artificial social inequality! The formerly enslaved Black student became a recognized leader in the highest leadership body in the church. The church conventions and vestries were political sites of organizing and engagement and these claims for black dignity and autonomy were realized in these very spaces.

A second lesson that Bragg took from his experience at the BTS was to have confidence in educated black leaders in the church: They were as capable as anyone. Attending schools like the BTS and other training was essential to advancement in the ministry. It was the path to ordination and leadership in churches that some white people would not believe to be possible. Bragg and his fellow activists in the Conference of Church Workers Among Colored People (CCWACP) argued, using Du Boisian constructs of the divisive effects of segregation, that “[a]mong the eight odd priests and deacons who live within this veil are a number who, despite their lowly origin, have made steady ascent along the road of self-conquest.”Footnote ³⁶ Some white people doubted these Black ministers’ capacities despite their being trained and found capable of leading in the churches. Nevertheless, education provided the foundation for entering these conversations about leadership. The content of the liberal arts education also placed these Black ministers in positions of authority; soon enough, white supremacists began to resist such education being accessible to freedpeople.Footnote ³⁷

A third lesson Bragg derived was that the obstacle of white racism was surmountable and that this racism indexed a problem for white leaders to overcome even as Black people continued to struggle with it. Yet such deliberately placed obstacles, rather than always thwarting a student's progress, sometimes only incentivized them to struggle the harder for an equitable place of power and recognition in society. This was the case for Bragg.Footnote ³⁸ Though at first he mildly recounted that he had “longed to be a minister of Christ; but somehow, certain influences which I could not control had temporarily gotten in my way,”Footnote ³⁹ he later recognized that what was really at issue was that some white people did not like Black men with aspirations.

The particular white man who was the obstacle to Bragg's progress was the Reverend Giles B. Cooke, head of the normal school. Noted Bragg, “white Bishops and white people generally, just don't quite understand us. They don't understand aspiring and intelligent colored people, and only those who thoroughly understand us can really lead and successfully accomplish constructive work among us.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This was certainly one way of interpreting white people's attitudes toward Black people—that they did not understand life within the veil. Only those who were able to pierce the veil of segregation could successfully work among Black people. This work required white people to recognize their own racism in order to achieve the goals they purportedly sought.

The experience of Black people up to this point had been that white folks were neither willing to allow Black people to work on equal footing with them nor were they trustworthy religious leaders because of their own racist practices and support of white supremacy. So, while it may have been true that successful white allies would have recognized black intelligence and ambitions, progress was hindered not just by this lack of understanding but also by supporters of white supremacy's failure to recognize their own role in promoting racial inequality.

Bragg's experience of racism in his theological education set the stage for developing a critique of white churchmen and for identifying those who would support Black people's causes. From Bragg's point of view, this required white people to do some work around their own racism.

Bragg's experience of the ways that white people hindered God's work because of their racism was a formative moment in the political struggle for Black humanity and for political participation. Like other Black folks, he recognized that this white supremacy must be overturned, and that black self-determination and self-sufficiency were key aspects of the resistance. The very thing that was noxious to the white racist Christian was also the very thing that Black people and their allies must preserve and cultivate. This sentiment was only reinforced by Bragg's early involvement in the growing Readjuster Movement.Footnote ⁴¹

Lessons about Race and Power in the Readjuster Movement and the Sewanee Conference

The Readjuster Movement represented the possibility of interracial cooperation. The Movement emerged in 1878 as a coalition of white conservatives and poor Black and white farmers who advocated adjusting the state debt to alleviate the tax burdens on the poor and to allow funding of budget priorities like education, issues that were high on the list of freedpeople's concerns. In this Movement, Black men were not viewed as haughty for holding political office but instead were viewed as political collaborators. The Readjusters’ opponents, the Funders, were named for their support of paying the state debt that the freedpeople at least were not responsible for having created. This Readjuster coalition was politically significant to the South because Democrats had nearly universal control of the southern states and because the biracial coalition drew Black supporters from an alliance with Republicans. Readjusters also supported black political officeholding even though they limited Black men to local and state legislative offices. The Readjusters were able to gain control of the state legislature in Virginia because thirteen Black legislators elected to the House of Delegates aligned with the Readjusters’ views on debt readjustment, education funding, and ending poll taxes.Footnote ⁴² They carried out Reconstruction.

This movement also showed that Black men could be politically efficacious and Bragg, while expelled from school, had a front row seat to this development.Footnote ⁴³ Serving as a page during the 1881–1882 legislature likely made him even more aware of the racism of the school's leaders and gave Bragg a greater sense of the possibilities of interracial cooperation and black political power. As a “newsboy,” he became a close aide to the editor of the Petersburg Index-Appeal newspaper, and learned typesetting; he also became close to the political manipulator and organizer, William Mahone.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both his appointment to be a page in the Virginia Legislature for the 1881–1882 legislative session and his appointment as postmaster in the House of Delegates enabled him to see Black men leading in politics and the partnership between white and Black men in political life.Footnote ⁴⁵

Bragg's changing attitude toward political engagement shows how instructive his political participation was. He wrote, “Although but a youth, I had been employed in connection with political work with the late Senator Mahone and former Congressman Brady. In that work I received such practical knowledge and insight into real things as have been of far more practical help in my ministerial work than any hint or suggestion ever received at the theological seminary.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Perhaps Bragg thought only of the courses and not the lessons his interactions with the Reverend Cooke imparted. The insight into the “real things” he acquired likely accorded with the power negotiations taking place within the political movement and, as it turned out, within the Episcopal Church. While Bragg elevates the lessons of his political experience over those of his seminary training, his experience in the Readjuster Movement likely highlighted just how much racism was keeping him and other Black men from attaining higher leadership roles.Footnote ⁴⁷ This was especially evident once he was elected as a delegate to the Republican State Convention in 1884.Footnote ⁴⁸ The early moments of the Movement reflected the possibilities of black power and white cooperation, a theme that he would later emphasize in his writings.

Yet Bragg, himself, considered his political engagement as a fall from grace, a distraction from his work of pursuing the ministry. He first considered his political work, not the racism that expelled him from school, to be the obstacle. Later, his interpretation shifted. In 1920, he responded to an article on Reconstruction in the Journal of Negro History by Monroe N. Work, correcting the record and adding some facts to the account of black participation in Reconstruction. Bragg recounted the involvement of Black legislators in 1881–1882, testifying to the political power and efficacy of Black delegates. This was a particularly important session; laws were passed advancing the causes of Black people, specifically that of freedom.Footnote ⁴⁹ Bragg's front-row seat to the most consequential legislative session of the Readjuster Movement and of Reconstruction in Virginia made him an authoritative reporter of black political engagement and black progress and likely shaped his views of the possibilities of interracial cooperation.

Bragg's initial understanding of politics as a distraction from his calling eventually gave way to his embrace of it. At the time, Bragg may have believed himself to have been rightly disciplined by Cooke and his political engagement as an extension of the cause of that rebuke, but by the time he returned to the school in 1886, and certainly by the time he started writing histories that placed Black people in the historical framework, his views had changed. His transformation was complete when, instead of disavowing his political engagement, he embraced it by writing to the Journal of Negro History. No longer was his foray into politics a distraction; it became a badge of honor.

As Bragg's political star was ascending, however, forces within the Church were mobilizing to segregate Black people within the Church. Simultaneously, white supremacist power was erupting in paroxysms of violence in an attempt to quell black political power. The Danville Riot, which occurred just before the 1883 legislative election, helped decrease the voter turnout and began the decline of Readjuster power. That same year, the Sewanee Conference, a gathering of white southern bishops convened to address “the negro problem,” was the ecclesial analog to the Danville Riot, and the event that framed much of Bragg's later writing and his life.

On July 25, 1883, at the call of Bishop William Green (1798–1887) of Mississippi, several bishops convened in Sewanee, Tennessee, at the University of the South to discuss what to do about black churches, clergy, members, and leadership.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Sewanee conference proposition was that “[i]n any Diocese obtaining a large number of persons of colour, it shall be lawful for the Bishop and the Convention of the same to constitute such population into a special Missionary organization under the charge of the Bishop.”Footnote ⁵¹ The proposed “Colored Missionary Jurisdiction” (CMJ) would allow separate black parishes to form without having to be derived from an existing vestry.Footnote ⁵² And, while independent parishes could, ostensibly, be more easily and quickly established under the proposed CMJ plan, any proposal made by the CMJ convocation had to be approved by the Virginia Council,Footnote ⁵³ thus circumscribing the autonomy of the parishes included in the jurisdiction.

In a gathering in September 1883, several Black men under the leadership of the Reverend Alexander Crummell met in Washington, D.C., to respond to the Sewanee Plan and to send a delegation of Black people to the General Convention in 1883. They rejected the notion of allowing race to become the deciding qualification for a jurisdiction because, while they recognized the value of having race pride, they also understood that racial designations framed as “the negro problem” usually carried with them negative connotations. Beyond the complications of racial designations, they also saw a problem of leadership and spiritual authority. And, finally, this missionary jurisdiction would further limit Black people from participating in leadership councils at the national level because they would be under the supervision of the bishop.Footnote ⁵⁴

Where the Readjuster Movement put Black men in a consequential position of power—at least initially—the backlash in the political and ecclesial realms attempted to remove it. And the debate about the CMJ continued for nearly twenty years until the General Convention adopted the model of a suffragan bishop to oversee such separate jurisdictions within the diocese in 1910. According to Bragg, by 1922, it had never been used. And while the Convocation of Colored Clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church, now the CCWACP, requested an official statement on the status of Black people within the church, none was forthcoming.

Histories of Independent Black Episcopal Churches in Community with White People

Bragg spent a few years in seminary but a lifetime working with black church people and writing their histories. In short, he had the experience to make political claims about access to political power and about the need for black independence. Bragg's experiences showed him the need for Black people to have autonomy in their organizations even as they were part of larger white organizations. This was best exemplified in his repeated tellings of the history of St. Thomas African Episcopal Church—the first independent black Episcopal church in the United States, established in 1794—though this narrative is often overshadowed by the story of the first black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Bragg's emphasis on St. Thomas is evidence of his attempt to reframe the narrative.

His account of the formation of St. Thomas's highlights black independence within predominantly white spaces and links it to black self-determination that the Free African Society reflected. Through this account, Bragg wanted to draw attention to the ways that Black people, protesting racial discrimination in white churches, first formed their own social organization—the Free African Society—and out of that St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. These church people sought recognition and fellowship in the Episcopal Church, not the Methodist Church, out of which many of the members came.Footnote ⁵⁶ “The story of ‘The Free African Society,’” he wrote, “is exceedingly interesting for it furnishes us with the records and doings of the first organized body of people of African descent in this country.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This church was formed out of black protest and, upon its formal organization, it set the terms of unification with the Episcopal Church. This narrative approach echoed the practices many black Protestants engaged in during the nineteenth century. As historian Julius Bailey explains, members of the AME Church, writing in their denominational newspaper, “invo[ked] the past to substantiate claims and portend the future.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Like Bragg, the AME writers used the exodus event at St. George ME Church as a touchstone moment for the establishment of the church and as an indicator of what their future would hold: a moment of protest and a lifetime of liberation struggles.Footnote ⁵⁹ While the political effect of this narrative might be debated, the fact of this practice of narrating the past for present and future impact was certainly present among the AME and in Bragg's writing.Footnote ⁶⁰

That this collection of largely free Black people chose their own church affiliation was a remarkable feat in itself. The fact of the choice challenged the view of Black people's religion having been determined by slaveholders.Footnote ⁶¹ Even more astonishing and noteworthy is that they also demanded control of their congregation, the power to choose their own minister, and recognition by the denomination, conditions that were all honored. This allowed them to secure Absalom Jones as their priest, rector, and leader, despite him not having met the Greek and Hebrew language requirements that ordination required. The African church proposed several terms for unification with the Episcopal Church on August 12, 1794: that they be allowed to remain an organized church, that they maintain their local control, and that their leader come from among them.Footnote ⁶² Yet, although they were able to secure their independent leadership, they were not able to have representation at the diocesan annual council until “1862 or 1863”Footnote ⁶³; the lack of a fully credentialed minister later became a sticking point for the congregation to be recognized at the annual convention. But, at the moment of the church's formation, the establishment and respecting of these terms reflected self-determination, autonomy, and resilience.

Bragg recounted similar details in a festschrift celebrating the “First Negro Priest on Southern Soil,” the Reverend William Levington.Footnote ⁶⁴ Levington, who was born in New York, was the second Black priest ordained in the Episcopal Church (after Absalom Jones), and pastored St. James Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland.Footnote ⁶⁵ Bragg recounted the church's establishment: “[I]t was a day of peculiar significance to the descendants of the African race for all times to come, for it was the first occasion, anywhere in the South, where a local branch of any of the existing white churches had been initiated among the people of the African race, with all the powers of self-government, as well as with an educated pastor of the same race as the congregation.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Written into the constitution of St. James Episcopal Church was a provision that stipulated that only Africans or other Black people could be elected to office.Footnote ⁶⁷ This provision, included in the church documentation in 1829, reinforced the sense of black independence in a church still within the purview of predominantly white organizations. That Bragg continued to develop this theme in the early years of his writing about the Episcopal Church suggests the reasons for his inclusion of narratives of the AME Church in his writing.

The AME Church became a convenient contrast to illustrate what Black folks in the Episcopal Church had accomplished—a relationship with fellow white churchmen alongside autonomous power. By 1916, the AME church had established itself as a leader in the African American community. With Wilberforce University as its flagship institution of higher education, its faith and political mission wrapped into one.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Episcopal Church was regarded as being of similar stature in the struggle for black freedom. Thus the balance of Bragg's coverage and discussion of the AME Church and the Episcopal Church in some of his writings is notable. In his essay commemorating the centennial anniversary of the AME Church, Bragg's insistence on holding all actors in the black freedom struggle together was apparent by how he spent as much time discussing efforts outside of the AME church, purportedly at the center of the memorial essay. He emphasized the self-determination of the members of St. Thomas African Episcopal Church as he described the church being able to grow in a manner largely unfettered by the kind of interference or resistance that Black folks in the Episcopal Church had typically faced.Footnote ⁶⁹ The AME Church had been able to not just establish itself in the antebellum United States and move to the South to evangelize the freedpeople, but had also established branches in Canada, South Africa, and the Caribbean. This breadth reflected not just the AME “Black Atlantic consciousness,” but also the freedom to build communities unfettered by white people's interruption.Footnote ⁷⁰ Bragg seemed to be suggesting that working with white churchmen was more challenging than having a separate black denomination. Yet this juxtaposition of the two cases could be misread as an attempt to invalidate the accomplishments of the AME Church and the choice to remain in a predominantly white church could be read as disavowing Black people. It seems that Bragg felt the need to counter such interpretations by stating unequivocally that Black Episcopalians were as race-loving as the next Black person. Bragg acknowledges that the AME Church appeared to have greater autonomy explicitly to pursue separate black institutional organizations for black advancement. This was evinced in the development of the Colored Conventions.

Bragg explained that the AME Church, as an independent black denomination, and Richard Allen, as its leader, had more flexibility to respond to the suggestion that Black folks convene what became known as the Colored Convention.Footnote ⁷¹ While the AME Church had more autonomy to connect with a black-led political projects such as the Colored Conventions, this was not the only way for Black people to move forward. To reinforce his conclusions about autonomy and opportunity, in his memorial of the centennial of the AME Church, Bragg asserted that both Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were cut from the same cloth; even though one worked within the establishment and the other outside it, both worked for advancement of colored people.Footnote ⁷²

Rather than simply chronicle or document the church's presence, he argued for and celebrated Black people's advancement—how they clawed their way through the thickets of racism to assert themselves into the political and spiritual landscape of the church and of America.

Bragg's Critique of Fundraising Policies

Independent governance was a theme that fueled Bragg's focus on economic development among African American churchmen. His role as an ordained priest made him privy to the church's inner workings. So positioned, he acknowledged the need for financial support of independent black churches and urged black churches to be financially self-sustaining in order to ensure their goals would be secured. His position reflected a unique reality of interracial coexistence in the church that did not exist in the secular political discourses around “negro domination” that hindered White people from aiding Black people in the church and outside of it. In this context, his experience revealed the benefits of both assistance and independence, as long as leadership remained a homegrown post.

Concern for resources to sustain black churches and black-focused projects was linked with concerns about black leadership and the autonomy of black churches in the complicated landscape where resources were limited. The debate about a Black bishop and “negro domination” and funding is the landscape in which Bragg experienced the reality of funding models and their impact on the development of black churches. In their discourse around establishing a separate black bishop, Black members of the CCWACP interpreted the issues of funding in light of the politics associated with providing financial support and in light of the political issues of the day. White folks worried about “negro domination” and that financially supporting Black folks would allow Black folks to hold office on equal footing, which would enable Black people to influence political outcomes by aligning with a white minority and overcoming the white majority. This idea was dominant in the landscape of electoral politics and one that was potentially stoked by the existence of the Readjuster Movement, which one could argue was just that—a black minority aligned with a white minority to overcome a white majority. Yet such thinking completely excludes Black people from the body politic and suggests that their influence is illegitimate. Nevertheless, some White Episcopalians held this view.

In the case of the Black members of the CCWACP, they proposed that creating separate black leadership would avoid the issue altogether and would in fact allow for White people to support these black independent endeavors without concern that this was going to build alliances that would interfere with the politics among White folks. While many black church ministers were forced to go abroad or to sell pamphlets to raise money to support their work, they also recognized that some of their White supporters were afraid of giving generously to their work for fear that they would be viewed as supporting “negro domination.” In response, supporters of black church independence argued that separate churches would free up supporters from withholding funds because they didn't want to be pegged as supporting “negro domination.”Footnote ⁷³ The CCWACP strategy seems to accord with a Washingtonian social separatist strategy and also a black separatist approach, one that would eliminate political concerns.Footnote ⁷⁴ By contrast, Bragg's approach submerged white concerns about negro domination and instead foregrounded pursuit of efficacious development of black independence.

The issue of support was one that suffused Bragg's writing and the relationships between Black and White churchmen because it involved creating black autonomy with white support while not just trying to avoid white political critique and concern but also trying to avoid white domination over Black people. Black churches often lacked the resources needed to sustain their leaders and community work. The funding model of the churches and dioceses is unclear, but it seems that sometimes the bishop could pay priests salaries. More often, Black priests were left to raise money for themselves. Bragg describes one priest's 1849 journey all the way to England to raise money to retire his church's debt.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to Bragg's descriptions, the attempts to raise funds continued after emancipation, but the models of success differed. He received great support from White clergy in Norfolk when he took up his first rectorship.Footnote ⁷⁶ But by the early twentieth century, Bragg worried that Black leaders receiving diocesan support would cause the congregations to become too dependent on this support and priests funded by the bishop would be more beholden to the person who paid them than the people they served, and thus would not have the interests of Black people foremost in mind; only individuals most amenable to a white leadership would be funded.Footnote ⁷⁷ Bragg consequently celebrated when Black congregations were able to become completely financially self-sustaining, as St. James did under his leadership.Footnote ⁷⁸

Bragg notes that, early in the history of St. James Episcopal Church, the independent Black parishes were self-sustaining and they apparently struggled, but that when he became rector in 1891, the bishop funded his position and Bragg was able to lead the church to financial stability.Footnote ⁷⁹ The rectors who preceded Bragg had been paid by the congregation and the highest salary ever recorded from founding to the time Bragg came was $35 per month—and that was only for one year. Since Bragg's income was secured, “[n]ot only has a new congregation and a new church edifice been called into existence, but the congregation, long since, has been advanced to complete self-support; in addition to contributing its full share to diocesan and general objects.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Likewise, within a short period of his arrival as rector at Holy Innocents, his first post in Norfolk in 1886, he was able to help the congregation to become formally organized and to regain control of its property from the trusteeship of Christ Church. He wrote, “When I arrived in Norfolk the congregation had given up all hope of having the property, then occupied by them, transferred to them, and already had in mind another site.” He was able to get the Christ Church vestry to consider the request and turn the land over to the congregation.Footnote ⁸¹

Even though Bragg initially argued for financial support without consideration of white fears, he eventually shifted to arguments not just of white-funded separate churches, but to black independent self-funding because of the intransigence of white supremacy, not because of a belief that it would convince White people of Black people's value. Early independent churches struggled to raise money and went to extraordinary measures to secure themselves. Bragg was able to benefit from generous financial support that allowed him to help the churches he led become financially self-sustaining. Perhaps the point he was trying to make was that if the rector was supported by the diocese, the funds of the community could go to the sustaining work of the community—to retiring church debt and funding church programs—but that without the financial support of diocesan leadership, the churches would expend their resources on supporting their ministers and be able to accomplish little else. With the burden of paying the rector removed, once the churches were able to get on their feet, they could then move over to supporting their ministers too. What a model! But once these independent churches were established, the political landscape made financing black churches more politically fraught, both in terms of black leadership and in terms of white support. Black leadership might be compromised in that only Black people who met white standards would be supported. And White people might be hindered from supporting black churches because of fear that they would be accused of trying to create a situation where “negro domination” could happen. Beyond these politics, Bragg also noted that white leadership of black churches and even white donations to black churches often hindered rather than promoted black progress. So, by the early twentieth century, Bragg came to see the need for completely independently financed black churches and at this time he recommended a class model for black fundraising and black independence. Bragg's arguments about black church politics dovetailed with the zeitgeist of the early twentieth-century social scientists’ arguments that black churches needed to become more politically engaged, but his solutions differed. Rather than arguing for fewer churches and greater ecumenical collaboration, Bragg argued for black church independence from White people as the issue and major goal.Footnote ⁸²

Bragg advanced a slightly different model later in his history of African Americans in the Episcopal Church—one that more directly placed the responsibility of funding on the Black people and the churches. He proposed a system by which the black churches could gain their independence. He explained,

This model established the need for leaders to devote their time and energy to minister to their congregations and, following a Methodist class meeting model, to organize the church members to attend to financial giving.

Apparently, Bragg shared similar sentiments as the bishops of the AME Church who met with Episcopal Bishop William Paret (1826–1911) in 1897. Among those bishops was the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner. He suggested that the reason the Episcopal Church wasn't having more success among African Americans was because the Episcopal Church “pauperizes” Black people. Turner and some of the other bishops recommended instead that the churches fund themselves and offered their own churches as evidence of the success of such an approach.Footnote ⁸⁴ But there remained a tension regarding whether the congregations were owed support from the diocese and whether they would be more successful if they were financially independent.

Outside of the early narrative concerns with black independence and with White allies, Bragg also demonstrated a keen attention to Black people being at the forefront of their own struggle. In recounting the history of the St. Matthews Church in Detroit, Michigan, Bragg writes of the blockage that having white leadership caused and the advancement attained when a Black leader with a vision took the helm: “After a succession of White ministers which operated disadvantageously by relieving the colored people from a proper sense of their own responsibility and kept many of the colored people out of the Church, the wisdom of calling a colored man as rector became apparent and resulted in the change of policy.” The main issue seemed to be that Black people under white leadership did not take control of their own destinies but once a Black minister, the Reverend Charles H. Thompson, DD, came to the church in April 1890, “the actual responsibility of caring for an up-to-date church opened before the gaze of the people who had hitherto been assisted on every side.”Footnote ⁸⁵ A Black leader at the helm opened new vistas of opportunity and self-direction.

Bragg emphasized the importance of black leadership for generating more black leadership. He articulated how important it was for him, as a child, to see the Reverend J. S. Atwell as the first Black rector of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, which his grandmother Caroline Bragg helped found and where he worshipped.Footnote ⁸⁶ Bragg also emphasized this point when he articulated how important it was for Black ministers to produce other Black ministers. He took great pride in the men he mentored into ministry and recorded the lineages of ministers, noting in which churches they had been raised whenever he wrote of the churches they were now leading.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ultimately, Bragg came to celebrate those Black ministers who were able to develop economically self-sustaining congregations, another indicator of how the relations with White church people helped push the political development of black churches, in this case toward an economically self-sufficient model.

Bragg's funding model indexes how the politics of a movement built around funding and race-based political coalitions added to a deeply offensive convocation of White church leaders attempting to determine the future of Black people informed strategies of interdependent independence and insistence on homegrown leadership. His own narrative reflected a process of evolution where financial support from the bishop and other white churches allowed him and his congregation to realize their independent ends, and this despite the attempts of his former teacher to hinder his opportunities and without the white churches overdetermining the outcomes for the black churches. With this model, the churches Bragg served were able to achieve independence. But by the early twentieth century, this was no longer true. The political debates about interracial alliances and attempts to control rather than assist the development of black leadership meant that black churches would have to go this distance alone if they were to realize their own dreams.

Black Democratic Independence in and through the Episcopal Church

Bragg's writings reveal coherent themes of black church autonomy in their structures and economic independence, themes framed by his theological experiences of racism and inequality and his own experiences of what worked. Rather than argue that separate race-based churches were the only means forward, Bragg continued to subscribe to the Episcopal Church tradition as a means of organizing people, and even, as Episcopal Church historian Harold T. Lewis argued, out of belief in the “universality of the church.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Like Richard Allen of the AME Church, Bragg believed in the ecclesiology of the church to which he belonged and chose to remain there in the struggle for black dignity and self-determination. As he wrote and reflected more on the specific way that the Episcopal Church fit the needs of African American people, he highlighted how the Episcopal Church structure and organization provided a particularly useful context for Black people to learn about and exercise their political rights and underscored the possibilities of interdependent independence.

Unlike common school and more advanced education that together provided Black people with the educational foundations to appear respectable to White folks,Footnote ⁸⁹ theological education gave Black people access to a specific set of claims afforded by a democratically structured church. In his contribution to a project illustrating Black people's respectability through their erudition and education, Bragg wrote about why the Episcopal Church was the church best suited to Black people's needs. He suggested that slavery was the reason Black people were Baptists and Methodists, implying that they had little choice in the matter. But in the era in which they could choose, the Episcopal Church's lineage as the one true church made it an attractive option, one that Black people chose of their own volition. He also suggested that Black people could break from their enslaved past by worshipping in a different tradition. It helped that this new tradition had a democratic and orderly process of decision making and that it prided itself on its equality between lay people and the clergy.Footnote ⁹⁰ Such practices and structures would allow Black people to participate actively in governance and do so on an equal footing, rather than the subordinated dynamics inherent in the institution and relations instantiated in the institution of slavery.

As I initially did, one might understand Bragg's arguments about the appropriateness of the Episcopal Church for Black people as being about denominationalism. Bragg certainly had critiques of Baptists and Methodists, but to focus on this might be to miss the larger point about why the Episcopal Church was most suited to Black people. He highlighted the political education the Episcopal Church offered, another way his affiliation provided political insight beyond what citizenship afforded. In 1902, in a short essay titled “Are Other Than Baptist and Methodist Churches Adapted to the Present Negro?” Bragg wrote that the “regularity” of the Episcopal Church, its deep roots in the origins of Christianity itself, the orientation of the church toward uplifting and upbuilding men rather than putting them out of the church, the orderliness of the worship, and the Episcopal Church's bent toward teaching together made it the ideal church for Black people.Footnote ⁹¹ He also admired and advocated for the church because of its democratic practices. Bragg argued that this denomination was ordered against the “anarchy and confusion” that the practices of other churches promoted,Footnote ⁹² citing as evidence for this the church's orderly organization, the equality between the clergy and laity, and its deliberative processes. Such practices, he said, made the church a training ground for political engagement that was systematic and helpful for the larger political sphere in which Black folks found themselves.Footnote ⁹³ Bragg does not explain this idea further, but perhaps it was as historian Harold T. Lewis explained in regard to the Black folks who formed the St. Thomas Episcopal Church: “[T]hey [Black Episcopalians] saw the Episcopal Church as ‘a body whose authority, structure was somewhat fluid and whose philosophy, especially under Bishop White, favored the existence of an individual, self-governing congregation, while offering the necessary theological and liturgical structure and financial support.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The particular experience of semiautonomous parishes or congregations with some support was an idea toward which Bragg gestured. Bragg arrived at this analysis well after his participation in the Readjuster Movement, suggesting that both his experience in the movement and his many years in the Episcopal Church informed his ideas.

Bragg also critiqued democracy as a process, suggesting that it seemed to promote confusion. This interpretation does not suggest Bragg completely rejected democratic practices, however. The Episcopal Church that Bragg recommended to Black people used many democratic voting procedures and legislative processes akin to the American political system. Thus, Bragg found the Episcopal Church to be orderly and conducive to the spiritual development of Black people. It is therefore reasonable to extrapolate from Bragg's statement that the democratic scene in the politics of the nation and perhaps in other churches was the site of “anarchy” and “disaster and confusion.” His location in the Episcopal Church provided a vantage point from which to critique the politics of Reconstruction and of the Readjuster Movement where black political achievement was muddled and limited by racist ideals and the complications of the notion of interracial political alliances. By the time of Bragg's writing, the Readjuster Movement, once a bastion of interracial cooperation, had disintegrated into racist resistance to black officeholding at the highest levels and into what some pejoratively called “drawing the color line”—a practice that, when viewed from the perspective of White folks, was understood as interfering with politics by promoting Black candidates and, when viewed from the perspective of Black voters and participants, was an act of pursuing and preserving black advancement, also called being “race men” or “race women.” Though Bragg found the possibilities the Episcopal Church afforded to be notable, they were not supreme or perfect, as was evident in the debates about the pursuit of a Black bishop in which many Black Episcopalians had been engaged since 1883.

Bragg's analysis of the structural possibilities of the church allowed him and his contemporaries to identify racism and racist people as the cause of inequality and to push for redress that would allow Black people to circumvent racist people. By lifting up the democratic and orderly practices of the church, Bragg reinforced what was helpful about the Episcopal Church structures of leadership, voting, and participation, which also left room for structural addresses of racial inequality that would take the form of increased black autonomy with continued economic support. This argument differed significantly from the claims that Baptists made about black leadership being a necessary indicator of black acumen and skill.Footnote ⁹⁵ Black skill alone could not mitigate white racism. These arguments for black participation in the Episcopal Church extended beyond mere arguments of the universality of the church and its inclusiveness of all people, as historian Harold Lewis argued.Footnote ⁹⁶