In 1821, Rev. Lott Carey (1780-1828) a recently self-emancipated, recently ordained/licensed Baptist preacher, became part of the first wave of Black people to emigrate from the United States to Liberia. Carey’s departure reflected his rejection of slavery and quasi-slavery, his embrace of the Gospel Great Commission to evangelize, and his sense of connection with African people.

This paper explores one of the many forms of movement that fostered and influenced African American religion. Carey’s case is a portrait of black religion viewed through the overlapping prisms of emigration and evangelism, contoured by the Black people’s freedom dreams and ideas about racial identity. This depiction provides a glimpse of the complicated motivating forces of the early Black emigrationists and is part of a larger view of Black religious movements. Thus, this paper offers a more nuanced view of the contours—if not the consequences--of Black emigration that considering Black religion affords.

Dr. Nicole Myers Turner joined the Princeton Department of Religion as Assistant Professor in 2022. She specializes in African American religious, political and gender history in the nineteenth century and mobilizes Africana Studies and Black Digital Humanities methods in her research. Her book, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), narrates the transformation in Black religious political strategies that occurred from 1865 to 1890. In addition to being published as a paperback, the book also appears as an open-access, enhanced e-book by Fulcrum Press and features interactive images and maps. Soul Liberty has been widely reviewed and was a finalist for the 2021 Library of Virginia Literary Nonfiction Award. Her research has been supported by the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State, where she was a post-doctoral fellow, several archives in Virginia and North Carolina, and she was recognized as a Young Scholar of American Religion 2016-2018. In addition to researching the history of Black Protestants and politics after Emancipation, Turner has written essays on Black Christianity after Emancipation, African American Religion and Politics, and Black church activism and race politics beyond the binaries of accommodation and protest. She is currently researching early African American religious history and themes of physical, social and affective movement