Pan-Africanism represents the complexities of black political and intellectual thought over two hundred years. What constitutes Pan-Africanism, what one might include in a Pan-African movement often changes according to whether the focus is on politics, ideology, organizations, or culture. Pan-Africanism actually reflects a range of political views. At a basic level, it is a belief that African peoples, both on the African continent and in the Diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny. This sense of interconnected pasts and futures has taken many forms, especially in the creation of political institutions.
One of the earliest manifestations of Pan-Africanism came in the names that African peoples gave to their religious institutions. From the late-1780s onward, free blacks in the United States established their own churches in response to racial segregation in white churches. They were tired, for example, of being confined to church galleries and submitting to church rules that prohibited them from being buried in church cemeteries. In 1787 a young black Methodist minister, Richard Allen, along with another black clergyman, Absalom Jones, established the Free African Society, a benevolent organization that held religious services and mutual aid for “free Africans and their descendants” in Philadelphia. In 1794 Jones accepted a position as pastor of the Free African Society’s African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. Allen, desiring to lead a Methodist congregation, established in southern Philadelphia’s growing black community the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which also served as a way station on the Underground Railroad. Africa in the name of these early black religious institutions reflected an expansive worldview and an African consciousness evident also in Allen’s support for emigration back to Africa and Haiti. Indeed, in 1824 this impulse led approximately six thousand blacks from Philadelphia and other U.S. coastal cities to immigrate to Haiti; a community descended from Philadelphia blacks who settled in what was then eastern Haiti still exists in Samaná, a small peninsula city in the northeast of the Dominican Republic.
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