An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord's Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith the Colored Evangelist

by Amanda Smith, J. E. Dodson

Overview

Amanda Berry Smith was a trail-blazing black woman evangelist of the nineteenth century. She became a member of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal congregeation in Philadelphia in 1865, a time when women were denied positions of authority in the denomination. By the time of her death in 1915 the church had conceded to women the positions of congregational stewardess, conference evangelist, and denominational deaconess. Her autobiography, first published in 1893, not only captures the spirit of the woman who became a celebrity of Christian evangelism around the world; it also tells us much about black women's historical struggle to be accepted into the ministry and polity of denominations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195052619
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/14/1988
Series:	The ^ASchomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	608
Product dimensions:	5.71(w) x 8.86(h) x 1.72(d)

About the Author

Union Theological Seminary

Editorial Reviews

"The union of religion and political agitation...remains constant throughout the century....It is most evident in the spritual autobiographies of evalgelists like Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, and Amanda Smith. Smith's 1893 account of her career in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she rose from deaconess despite the significant opposition of male preachers, is all the more striking against the backdrop of her childhood experience of slavery. In the transport of her own conversion experience, the young Amanda Smith ran to a mirror to see whether her color had changed."—Eric J. Sundquist in The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher