The American Missionary — Volume 42, No. 03, March, 1888

This March 1888 issue of The American Missionary arrives at a hinge moment in American history. Reconstruction has collapsed. Jim Crow is rising. And the American Missionary Association, born from abolitionist conviction, continues its urgent work of building schools and training leaders for newly freed Black communities. The periodical pulses with dispatches from the field: reports on Black political gatherings in Georgia organizing for survival, tributes to missionaries who died in service, and passionate editorials arguing that Christian education remains the only path to uplift in a hostile nation. Articles document the AMA's network of schools battling Southern illiteracy, while other pieces reveal the era's broader global anxieties about Islam in Africa and the challenges of converting Chinese immigrants. This is not nostalgia. It is raw evidence of a community's determination to transform America through faith and education, even as the nation turns its back on Black citizenship. Essential reading for historians of American religion, education, and race relations. This primary source captures the complex legacy of post-Reconstruction missionary work, the idealism, the limitations, and the quiet heroism of those who refused to abandon newly freed communities to Jim Crow.