Higher Mission

Kimberly D. Hill's scholarly study looks at the colonial past of central Africa through the lives of Alonzo Edmiston and Althea Brown Edmiston, two African American missionaries. They met while serving in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, which sought to help people in the Congo Free State who were enduring forced labor and violent mistreatment under Belgian rule. Working amid a rising human rights movement, the couple recognized a shared purpose, and they drew on the principles of industrial education, made famous by Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, to spread Christianity and provide practical help to local communities.

Between 1902 and 1941, the Edmistons shaped their projects around building community, respecting indigenous resources, and including the views of African participants. Their work covered childcare, schooling, translation, construction, and farming, all of which depended on steady communication with their Kuba neighbors. Hill closes by tracing how the Edmistons' teaching methods shaped government-run industrial schools in the Belgian Congo into the 1950s.

The book brings attention to African American missionaries, who have received little notice from historians, and to the wider reach of Black education in the American South. It also examines the part black foreign missionaries played in the early civil rights movement, arguing for a previously overlooked link between nineteenth-century Pan-Africanism and activism during the interwar years.