Recovering lost Black history matters for the Black church because the gaps in the record were never left empty. When Reconstruction-era Black leaders were pushed out of office and then out of memory, a story moved into the space they left: the claim that Black people had never been capable of governing. Historian Dr. Alicia Jackson spent more than a decade reconstructing the life of one such leader, Isaac Anderson. His story shows how that myth was made, and why a church that does not know its own past ends up believing what was said about it.
Jackson names the myth directly. She calls it part of the Lost Cause story, “the idea that black leadership was inept.” She doubts most academic historians still believe it. Her concern is ordinary readers, who meet the old version on library shelves and absorb it. Because stories like Anderson’s went untold, she argues, “there is sort of a expectation that blacks cannot be politically active and be capable political leaders.” In other words, a missing story does not stay missing for long, because people fill the silence with whatever explanation is closest at hand, and the closest one was the Lost Cause.
Who was Isaac Anderson?
Anderson was born enslaved near Fort Valley, Georgia, a little south of Macon. According to Jackson, the man who owned him was his own father, William Jackson Anderson, a white slaveholder who was also involved in the slave trade, and Isaac worked for him. The two men would later sit in the same state legislature on opposite sides of Reconstruction. That relationship is the spine of Jackson’s book, a micro history published by University Press of Mississippi, which follows one father and one son through the years when Black Georgians first won political power and then lost it.
Anderson’s religious life ran alongside his political one. Jackson says he spent time in the African Methodist Episcopal Church before helping to found a new body in 1870, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, known as the CME. It grew out of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, one of the denominations that had split over slavery. Late in life Anderson moved to Jackson, Tennessee, where he served as a trustee of Lane College and gave to it generously.
Almost none of this appeared in the histories. Jackson found the thread while writing a dissertation on the CME Church and Mississippi Industrial College in Holly Springs. She came across a brochure that Anderson’s descendants had assembled decades after his death, which said he had served in the Georgia legislature and worked on behalf of Black Georgians. That surprised her, because the standard histories she knew say “that the CME church was not involved in politics.” A family document contradicted the scholarly consensus, and following that contradiction led her to the father, the legislature and a decade of research.
How the record was cleared
The sequence of events is where the argument lives, so it helps to see it in order as Jackson lays it out:
- 1868. Georgia finishes its constitutional convention, with Isaac Anderson among the delegates, and voters must approve the new constitution. Jackson also marks this as the year the Ku Klux Klan rises in Georgia. Father and son both run for the legislature. William Jackson Anderson wins a seat in the state Senate as a Democrat, in a party Jackson describes as closely aligned with the Klan. Isaac runs for the state House and loses.
- After the 1868 election. Black legislators are expelled, and Jackson says the father supported the ousting of Henry McNeal Turner and other Black lawmakers. Later the father is himself removed from the legislature over his support for the Confederacy, amid concern that Georgia would fail to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. His Senate seat is left open.
- 1870. The CME Church is founded, and its founding documents say the denomination will stay out of politics. Four days later, Isaac Anderson wins his father’s former Senate seat.
- 1874. By Jackson’s account, Anderson is among the last Black men to serve in the Georgia Senate in that era. She says the next would not serve until the 1960s.
That gap of roughly ninety years comes from Jackson’s research, and readers should check it against her book. Its meaning is clear enough. The long absence of Black senators in Georgia was produced by expulsion and exclusion, and it says nothing about whether Black men could govern, because some had already been elected and served.
The 1870 founding statement deserves a closer look. Jackson suggests the pledge to avoid politics reflected the white Southern Methodists in the room. Anderson held the opposite conviction, and Jackson says he was “very vocal in that he believes that black people should be able to be political,” with churches part of that work. The new church did not expel him for winning office days after its founding, and Jackson notes that the Southern Methodists let it pass, likely because they feared leaders like Anderson might leave for the AME or AME Zion churches if pressed. He then used the network he was building as a church organizer to help elect a slate of Republican candidates.
By that point Democrats again controlled the state, and there was little an elected Black Republican could accomplish. So Anderson turned to another kind of leadership. Jackson describes him helping lead Black Georgians out of the state to Arkansas and north Mississippi, places where they could live more safely. She sets this inside a wider pattern in which Black ministers, when the church could no longer shelter people from violence, moved them toward majority-Black or all-Black communities.
Read in this order, the events explain why erasure is the better word than neglect. Black men were elected, some were expelled by their colleagues, others held on until a party tied to the Klan regained power, and afterward a story about the period told readers that the Black officeholders had simply failed. The careers of men like Anderson were the evidence against that story, and the story depended on their being forgotten.
Jackson adds an honest qualification. Some of the loss came from ordinary scholarly habit. Historians writing about the CME tended to focus on one bishop, Lucius Holsey, who openly supported the Southern Methodists and spoke of keeping the church out of politics. Jackson finds much of what he said troubling, and she argues that he was one voice among a larger group of CME leaders who were challenging the system. Historians repeated Holsey and overlooked Anderson. Deliberate political exclusion came first, the Lost Cause retelling followed, and narrow academic attention then made the denomination look as quiet as the myth required.
Wasn’t the early CME church accommodating to white power?
This is the strongest objection, and Jackson does not wave it away. The CME carried a reputation as an accommodating church that did whatever the Southern Methodists wanted. It received property from them, and the AME and AME Zion churches criticized it for that.
Jackson accepts the facts behind the reputation and questions the conclusion drawn from them. The CME was a largely rural denomination serving people just out of slavery, in a South shaped by sharecropping and the convict lease system. In her words, “they had to walk a really fine line in terms of getting the financial support they needed, but then having their own.” Their name was part of that line. They called themselves the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, without “South,” and presented themselves as an all-Black denomination in the line of the original Methodist Episcopal Church. Jackson compares their posture to double consciousness, with one message for white audiences and another inside the Black community, and she describes it as a form of code switching that historians have not really understood. Over time, she says, the CME gained its autonomy and became openly vocal in politics.
The objection keeps some force. Public accommodation is a matter of record, while private resistance is harder to document, so a reader can fairly ask how much of the dual message is proven and how much is inferred. Jackson’s answer rests on what leaders did. Anderson ran for office four days after a founding statement that disavowed politics, organized Republican voters through church networks, and moved families out of danger. Those actions are difficult to explain as simple compliance.
What the record can’t tell us
Jackson is candid about the limits of her evidence, and that candor is part of why her correction can be trusted. As she puts it, “there are no diaries.” The father and son relationship shows what that means. The family told her that before he died, the father gave Isaac a large sum of money, enough to let him step away from ministry for a time and become a successful businessman in Tennessee. The father’s obituary mentions Isaac, though not plainly as his son, and Jackson describes such things in those communities as open secrets.
It is tempting to read the gift as guilt finally catching up with the father. Jackson will not settle the question, because without diaries the motive cannot be known. She points instead to a theme that runs through her book, “how complex relationships are.” The same man who owned his son, and who supported laws that harmed him and the Black community, also funded his son’s later independence. Correcting a myth does not license a counter-myth, and Jackson’s account makes neither Anderson a flawless hero nor his father a simple villain. She reports what the documents and the family can support and stops where they stop.
Why this matters for the church now
Members of the Black church have often absorbed a misdescription of their own tradition. If people believe the CME was apolitical, or that Black Reconstruction leaders were incompetent, they will read their history through that distortion. Jackson wants a different starting question: “I wanna hear what did black people do? How did they survive? How did they manage and in many cases thrive.” The question moves attention away from what was done to Black communities and toward what those communities built.
That shift has practical consequences for how a present-day believer reads the church. Many younger Christians who carry real hurt from churches have come to see the institution as a place that asked them to stay quiet and endure. Anderson’s story complicates that picture without denying anyone’s experience. In his era the church was the network through which freed people organized to vote, the institution that kept an elected senator in its leadership when its own founding statement pointed the other way, and the body whose ministers moved families out of danger when politics failed. Jackson writes about “how the black church served as a place of healing” for people suffering violence outside its doors. A believer who knows this history can hold two things at once: the specific harms done by particular churches, and a longer record in which the church was where Black Georgians found shelter, leadership and a way out. Without that record, the only available evidence is personal experience and the Lost Cause version, and both leave out the people who built the institution.
Jackson also sees Anderson’s relocation work as one strand in a much longer pattern. She connects it to Black families today seeking out majority-Black communities, including a new community founded south of Atlanta, and to Charles Blow’s argument in The Devil You Know that Black Americans should return to the South to build political power. The impulse to gather people where they can be safe and govern themselves did not start recently, and knowing Anderson’s story lets people see where it came from.
Scripture treats this kind of memory as an obligation a community keeps on purpose. In Joshua 4, after Israel crosses the Jordan, God tells them to set up twelve stones taken from the riverbed. When children in later generations ask what the stones mean, their parents are to tell them what God did there. The passage is narrative, describing a specific act of remembrance, and it does not command any particular modern practice. It does show a people who understood that memory fades unless someone deliberately preserves it and hands it down, and that children who are never told will form their own account of where they came from.
Jackson’s research works in the same spirit. “When we don’t tell these stories, we lose so much,” she says, and “when we can reclaim these stories, I think it helps us to be able to move forward, have perseverance.” Perseverance depends on knowing that others endured hard places and kept building. Isaac Anderson organized a church, won the seat his father had held while working to keep men like him out, and moved people to safety when politics could no longer protect them. The myth of Black political incapacity needed his name to disappear, and putting it back takes away one of the myth’s oldest supports.