African American Review

Levi Jenkins Coppin (1848-1923), an A. M. E. Bishop, missionary to South Africa, and editor of the A. M. E.'s Church Review, was proud of his library and especially what he called its "Black Boys" section. In his autobiography, he called special attention to a work on this stretch of shelf that hadn't received its due, to his mind, "an old and rare volume" from 1867 with an epic title: The Rise and Progress of the Kingdoms of Light and Darkness (Coppin 263-64). The book, modeled after Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress, retold all of human history as an ancient war between King "Alpha" and "Abadon," God and Satan, a conflict that had erupted anew most recently in the American Civil War and the battle against race prejudice in Reconstruction.

Little is known of its author, Lorenzo Dow Blackson, beyond what he himself recorded in the book. Perhaps taking after Frederick Douglass, Blackson first greets readers with an engraved portrait of himself sporting a neat suit and graying goatee, his lips pursed and brow raised as if surprised by the vision he is about to relate. Named after the Methodist preacher, Blackson writes that he was born in Delaware in 1817 to formerly enslaved parents and raised in the Methodist Episcopal church, but was now a member of Peter Spencer's African Union Church after growing disillusioned with racism in the former. He apologizes for his brief schooling, which ended prematurely as a result of discrimination at the hands of white students. Most importantly, Blackson recounts his conversion experience after hearing an itinerant Methodist preacher as a teenager, agonizing enough to rival any Puritan as it heaved him between moments of rapture and spells that left him "heavy and cold," sometimes eager for death. He found peace only when he promised to heed God's command to "go out and warn sinners" (Blackson 7-9).

Light and Darkness is his attempt to do so, a Herculean effort to accomplish for Reconstruction America what Milton and Bunyan had done in Restoration England. "I also was once a rebel against King Alpha, and in the vile service of Abadon," Blackson writes. After being wounded by a "Gospel bow," though, he enlists in the Army of Light and records its history until its most recent battles in America. Rather than regurgitating Bunyan, the book offers a visionary mix of universal history, doctrinaire Protestantism, and postbellum black social critique. As a proud member of "the Protestant Corps," Alpha's true army and the mortal enemy of the "Roman Division," Blackson relates its five "grand divisions" stationed in Asia, Africa, Europe, America, and "Oceanica … all the islands of the sea." If he is anti-Catholic, Blackson also protests the racism within his own Corps. "Even in the Army of Light, the place where it should never be found," he writes, generals and cadets alike draw "a line of demarkation between their colored and white fellow soldiers" (159).

Blackson combats this prejudice with a blend of Ethiopianist and Christian arguments, declaring that Africans were the "first most powerful and enlightened people on earth," but later fell from this glory into "great darkness and ignorance" because they rejected King Alpha, "a warning to other divisions, lest they too should … fall into the same or a worse position" (128). In fact, the most recent battle in Alpha and Abadon's ancient struggle, the American Civil War, was the [End Page 217] latest such instance. Blackson's interpretation of the conflict was unequivocal, its cause "due to the general government supporting and sustaining slavery, that great sin against the King of Light" (173). Despite professing to be the Vanguard of Alpha's Army, America was "exceedingly slothful to attack these grand enemies to their king and his cause, they fearing more to offend the men of the world, than the King of Light himself." This leaves Abadon's demonic forces free to flourish, corrupting the "entire army of occupation in the United States" and "unfitting them for entering into any very great and important battles against...