Sankofa: Radical Millenarianism and Post-apocalypticism in African American Religious Historiography in the Atlantic World

• In Event: Faith, Religious Traditions, and the Church

Abstract

This article provides a survey of the scholarship on the literature of millennialism, apocalypticism, and post-apocalypticism in African American religion. This work aims to establish a criterion and understanding of the occurrence of radical millenarian belief in African American Christianity from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. This article argues that African American Christianity produced a militant millennial movement in the early twentieth. This article also asserts that we can identify a black militant millennial tradition that spans across two centuries from the slave insurrections of Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner to William Monroe Trotter’s civil rights activism in the early twentieth century. In making the case for the importance and existence of a black militant millennial tradition, this work also asserts that this millennial tradition included a substantive vision of the post-apocalyptic world that for black militant millennialists of the nineteenth century comprised a world devoid of racial slavery, while militant millennialist of the twentieth envisioned a post-apocalyptic world that repudiated racial segregation and discrimination.

Author

• Aaron Pride, Lafayette College