Exodus: Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America

"Glaude is a groundbreaking scholar who writes beautifully. Exodus is an incredibly sophisticated, highly readable work. It’s a nice entry point to early nineteenth-century black life in the United States. Exodus was widely acclaimed when first published in both literary circles and among academics, and by historians and those who study religion. Glaude provides us a narrative of the earliest stages of black freed people as they are imagining their political future. He does that through the document trail of the period’s intellectuals and the institutional documents of black religious organization. So, it’s an intellectual history, a political history and a religious history, beautifully written and filled with engaging figures from this period. It’s important not to see black nationalism as a late civil rights movement reaction. Often, black nationalism is imagined as emerging in the late 1960s. But in the early nineteenth century, with the exception of Haiti, black people were not citizens anywhere. Enslaved people are not citizens; colonized people are not citizens. So, in the early nineteenth century there was a fervor for creating a state that black people could be a part of—not just in America but in many parts of the world. By reading Glaude, we can apprehend that black nationalism is a recurring current that flows throughout the history of black politics, black religious life, and the entire course of US history."