Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

A 1975 article in Ebony Magazine that recounted a fascinating tale of a free black family from South Carolina and a meeting twenty-seven years later in Nigeria became the impetus for Lisa A. Lindsay's captivating account of James Churchill "Church" Vaughan, a "free [End Page 259] black" from South Carolina who found economic and political autonomy in Yorubaland. Vaughn's transatlantic journey is a narrative of survival, prosperity, and resistance to white supremacy that began in antebellum Camden, South Carolina, was followed by a two-year stay in Liberia, and ended in Yorubaland (present-day Nigeria). On his deathbed in 1840, "freed" Scipio Vaughan implored his children to leave South Carolina for Africa and twelve years later, Church embarked on an odyssey to navigate an integrated Atlantic world founded on slavery and racial terror that allowed for colonialism to flourish in late-nineteenth-century West Africa. Arriving at Monrovia, Liberia, aboard the ship Joseph Maxwell in 1853, Church earned a living as a carpenter and served in a militia after witnessing the frequent clashes between the local Dey, Vai, and Golah groups who were protected by the Liberian government. Yet, Church grew weary of Liberia and did not want to participate in an ethnic caste system similar to southern slavery, so he looked beyond the unofficial U.S. colony to find space and agency in West Africa. Bonds made in Liberia with two missionaries from the Southern Baptist Convention, a religious denomination founded on its support of American slavery, presented an opportunity for Church to relocate to Yorubaland. At the age of twenty-seven, Church arrived in Lagos, the first stop on his journey that would lead him nearly 150 miles into the interior through the town of Abeokuta and to Ijaye. Over the course of forty years, Church became fluent in Yoruba language and culture; was taken captive in Ibadan; served as a military sharpshooter; prospered through building, land purchases, and farming; married Sarah Omotayo; led a revolt against the racism espoused by the white church; and produced a first generation of staunch critics against British colonialism in Nigeria.

Lisa A. Lindsay's substantial study of Church Vaughan challenges the past Liberian model of black emigration by framing Vaughn as a transnational migrant and refugee who traversed the social, political, and physical landscapes in southwestern Nigeria. Using research from archives, libraries, museums, private homes, churches, graveyards, ruins, cities, and villages in the United States, Britain, Nigeria, and [End Page 260] Liberia, Lindsay's scholarship enhances our understanding of the economic, social, and political dynamics that black migrants encountered in the Atlantic world. Lindsay's distinctive contribution to the existing historiography of Diaspora studies offers a new lens that proves African and American history occurs simultaneously. Lindsay's important account of Vaughn's desire to make his "own marks" in nineteenth-century Africa highlights the extensive nature of enslavement, the changing meanings of freedom on both sides of the Atlantic, and the impact of black American settlements in West Africa.

Lindsay shows the pervasive nature of white supremacy in American religious activities in West Africa and highlights the "diasporic consciousness" of Vaughn and others, which linked colonial racism with the history of slavery; such actions mirrored the development of all-black religious and educational institutions in the United States. Lindsay's crucial chapters on Yorubaland trace Vaughn's rebellion against white missionaries in the Lagos Baptist Church against the backdrop of the European "scramble for Africa," the emergence of Ethiopianism, Ku Klux Klan violence, and South Carolina's denial of civil rights to blacks. Lindsay expertly weaves together the complex history of South Carolina and Yorubaland to argue that Vaughn succeeded in Lagos under British colonial rule, a feat that would have been impossible in South Carolina, as white southerners prevented economic and political freedoms for blacks during the Jim Crow era. Lindsay's book provides readers much...