“The Black Man's Burden”: African Americans, Imperialism, and Notions of Racial Manhood 1890–1910

Summary

Take up the White Man's Burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need […]

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-brought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers!

Rudyard Kipling, 1899

Take up the Black Man's burden –

“Send forth the best ye breed”,

To judge with righteous judgment

The Black Man's work and need […]

Let the glory of your people

Be the making of great men,

The lifting of the lowly

To noble thought and aim […]

J. Dallas Bowser, 1899

In 1899, about fifteen years after the Conference of Berlin accelerated Europe's partitioning of Africa, African-American preacher Henry Blanton Parks fervently believed the fate of Africa would be determined during the twentieth century. Parks struggled long and hard as a young man to secure an education in Georgia and rise in the ranks of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; he earned a reputation for having an expansive outlook in the process. By the time he became Secretary of Home and Foreign Missions, Reverend Parks not only located Christian redemption of Africa within the promise of a new century, he authored a book to convince other African Americans that it was their duty to conquer the continent for God, for Africans, for themselves. In Africa: The Problem of the New Century, Parks contended that if the AME Church failed to secure a righteous “destiny […] [for] the junior races of the world […] [and] historic Africa”, the scramble for Africa would blight the continent with liquor, vice, and genocide.