George Alexander McGuire was a fiery Black nationalist who was the first official chaplain of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. He also had a dream: to create a Black church for Black Episcopalians. It was called the African Orthodox Church, and it came into being in 1921 with high hopes of being the Anglican equivalent of the African Methodist Episcopal Church or the National Baptist Convention. Its success was short-lived, but understanding its history provides a valuable look into African American Anglican history.
McGuire was born in Antigua, which was a British colony and therefore still had an established church. He was baptized in the Church of England, his father’s faith. His mother, however, belonged to the Moravian Church, one of the larger denominations in Antigua, and McGuire became a Moravian minister. Yet after emigrating to the United States, he realized his heart belonged to Anglicanism, and he was ordained again as an Episcopal priest in the 1890s. He quickly began to experience the numerous roadblocks that had led Anna Julia Cooper to comment that “colored men, professing in their heart of hearts they are Episcopalians, are actually working in Methodist and Baptist pulpits.”
Black clergymen were relegated to the galleries at diocesan conventions, if they were invited at all. There was very little room for advancement for them, and certainly not to the episcopacy. The 1883 “Sewanee Proposal” for a missionary diocese for African Americans, akin to Methodist missionary conferences, was rejected. “There can be but one fold and one Chief Shepherd for all the people in any field of Ecclesiastical designation,” a white bishop said.
Compounding this, Black Episcopal churches were often not welcome in their dioceses as full parishes. In South Carolina, some left for the Reformed Episcopal Church because of this. Black Episcopalians were segregated into galleries, or had services in basements, or in tiny, overcrowded buildings that paled in comparison to the neighboring white churches.
Because of this, there were very few Black Episcopalians by the end of the 19th century, even if at the beginning of the century the Episcopal Church had been enthusiastic in reaching Black people. At one point before the Civil War, there were more Episcopal baptisms of Black people than white people in Louisiana. But much of this was because the enslaved had little choice about where to worship. The Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America even felt it had a particular duty to catechize slaves, because so many slave owners were Episcopalian. After the Civil War, Black parishes that had been full emptied out as Black people suddenly could choose to attend a church with a Black preacher, who was invariably a Baptist or Methodist. Only 20 Black men were ordained to the priesthood between 1866 and 1876 anywhere in the country.
But there would be more Black Episcopalians in the early 20th century, not because of any efforts on the part of the Episcopal Church but because of something else: immigration. Thousands of West Indians moved to the United States, many of whom were Anglicans. They were not used to the racist and segregationist attitudes of the Episcopal Church. They were also significantly more Anglo-Catholic than Black Americans, due to the missionary efforts of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which had developed a high-church ethos in the 19th century.
Many of those immigrants moved to Harlem, and after a variety of disappointing clerical posts and a return to Antigua, so did McGuire. After meeting Marcus Garvey and becoming chaplain of Garvey’s Black nationalist group, the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), he drew up plans for a new church. It fit in with UNIA’s belief in the necessity of Black people having separate institutions in all aspects of life where they would be free from white control. He created a service book that was clearly patterned onRe the Book of Common Prayer.
UNIA’s newsletter said “[w]hen Dr. McGuire left the Church of England in 1919, he left behind him the fragile theory and doctrine of ‘Apostolic Succession.’ He believes in the validity of non-episcopal ordinations; he believes that the time has come for church unity among Negroes; he believes that unity does not necessarily mean uniformity in worship, and that the coming African or Ethiopian Church will be big enough for all Negroes to enter, retaining their own worship as Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians.”
It wasn’t true.
McGuire had become part of the Reformed Episcopal Church when he returned to the United States in 1919, but he wanted something else. He had wandering Bishop René Vilatte ordain him as a bishop for the African Orthodox Church. If New York City could have chief shepherds for the Syrians, the Russians, and the Armenians, why could it not have one for Black people too?
He was soon asking UNIA members for money for a Negro cathedral, and it became clear that he had very specific ideas about what the African Orthodox Church should be that would not involve all “retaining their own worship.” Garvey (a Wesleyan turned heterodox Catholic) had heard enough: McGuire was out as chaplain-general. UNIA supported the Black church, but it promoted no church unto itself.
McGuire would continue hoping to gather all Black people into the African Orthodox Church, but this would not pan out. Ninety-five percent of the membership was former Anglicans, and a very specific kind of Anglican at that. Randall Burkett, author of Garveyism as a Religious Movement, said that “McGuire’s problem was failing to see that not everyone wanted to become an Episcopalian,” but perhaps more specifically it should be said his problem was failing to see that not everyone wanted to become an Anglo-Catholic. This was a church of birettas, subdeacons, and Latin, in a time when most Episcopalians only had Holy Communion once a month.
But among the small cadre of West Indian Anglican immigrants, and the even smaller cadre of Anglo-Catholic African Americans, it was a balm in Gilead. There was finally a place where they could worship freely, where Black men could be the rector of a parish, and where Jesus and the Madonna could be Black. The Anglo-Catholic contingent of the Episcopal Church was no more welcoming to Black people than anyone else. William Adams, the cofounder of Nashotah House, was opposed to the admission of Black students, and consequently no Black students were admitted until after his retirement in 1886 (and Nashotah’s first Black alumnus later entered the African Orthodox Church). The Holy Cross Fathers would not allow Black priests on their clerical retreats.
New African Orthodox Church parishes emerged anywhere there were West Indian immigrants, from Miami to Indianapolis to Nova Scotia. A small seminary was set up in New York City. There were missions to the Caribbean and to Africa. It was all bolstered by the powerful preaching of McGuire, who had been drawing huge crowds since he was a Moravian minister in Antigua.
The African Orthodox Church wanted to prove its orthodoxy by its strict Anglo-Catholicism, as well as by constant reprinting of pieces about the legitimacy of its apostolic succession. Members knew people did not see them as real, and it rankled. The A.M.E. was real, and the Syrian and Armenian and Russian Orthodox churches were real; why weren’t they?
They criticized the Episcopal Church not only for its dense racism but also for its latitudinarianism. Why, asked the church newsletter The Negro Churchman, had the Diocese of Massachusetts ordained a Universalist minister as a priest and allowed him to keep his Universalist credentials? That incident must have been especially hurtful for McGuire: he had grown a mission in Massachusetts to nearly 300 congregants in only a few years, but the diocese refused to allow the mission in as a parish, because it was Black.
The problem with churches founded by one charismatic man was that eventually those men die.
There had already been a priest who had been removed from his post a few years before who had started a competing denomination, but McGuire’s death in 1934 led to a flurry of men claiming to be his legitimate successor. A New York state judge had to decide who was civilly permitted to use the name of the African Orthodox Church.
But in the Episcopal Church, things were changing. Diocesan conventions were desegregated. Black priests had better job opportunities, and Black churches were gaining more autonomy. By the late 1940s, one African Orthodox Church priest in New York City was ordained into the Episcopal Church, and his 150-member congregation came with him.
The African Orthodox Church would continue to exist, but in an uneasy state. It moved from being the A.M.E. for Black Episcopalians to the world of questionable independent sacramental movement churches. Its history book (advertised in The Living Church) focused more on the legitimacy of Vilatte’s apostolic succession than Black nationalism. It declined, more and more. There was a resolution at the 1988 General Convention to discuss officially welcoming members back into the Episcopal Church that never went anywhere, perhaps because there were so few members.
Today very few parishes hang on. McGuire’s legacy is being mentioned in history books about Marcus Garvey, which rarely know what to make of McGuire’s ecclesiastical particularities. The Episcopal Church has come a long way on racial issues since 1921, but that doesn’t mean there are none left to resolve. But there is “undisputed apostolic succession” for all regardless of skin color, and in that, McGuire’s dreams were realized.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
