Midwestern Ethiopia

City of Black Souls is a superb study of an intoxicating era of American religious history and specifically of Black spirituality. It focuses on the impact of the transformational year of 1896, when the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia won an astounding victory against the invading colonialist forces of Italy, and this at a time when European imperial advances seemed unstoppable. The Battle of Adwa echoed across Africa, spawning multiple “Ethiopian” churches that survive to this day. Delighted Black Americans likewise saw the event in cosmic and often apocalyptic terms, believing that they were living through that prophetic movement when, in the words of Psalm 68, “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” Kai Parker uses the alternative “suddenly” for “soon,” which neatly captures the sense of immediacy following news of Adwa.

Over the coming century, the consequences were immense, driving new pan-African initiatives and resonating through many aspects of culture, including music and the visual arts. The movement found a natural capital in Chicago. “Between the dusk of Reconstruction and the riotous aftermath of World War I,” Parker writes, “Chicago became an Afrodiasporic hub of Ethiopianism—of Black aspirations for religious and political autonomy oriented by biblical invocations of ‘Ethiopia.’”

Vastly augmenting this impact was the near despair that Black Americans faced at the turn of the 20th century. Reconstruction had failed in 1877, and through the mid-1890s, Black people were struggling desperately to preserve their civil and political rights. In the very weeks that the news of Adwa was arriving in the United States, the Supreme Court was debating the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which would consecrate legal segregation for two generations to come. The appalling rise in lynchings provides an effective index of White supremacist efforts to restore the old order. By far the bloodiest period in the history of lynching was the years between 1891 and 1895, which accounted for almost 1,000 known incidents. Adding to the cumulative horror, many of those killings were accompanied by hideous torture and mutilation. Meanwhile, the spread of the convict leasing system de facto restored Black forced labor across much of the South.