The story of a fascinating and important figure in black American religious history
 
Samuel Robert Cassius was born to a slave mother and a white father in Virginia in 1853 and became a member of the Restorationist Movement (Disciples of Christ) while a coal miner in Indiana. For the rest of his long life (he died in 1931 at age 78), Cassius was an active evangelist, prolific publicist, dedicated leader of black Disciples, and an outspoken and uncompromising opponent of racism in religion and society.
 
An indefatigable preacher, Cassius ranged throughout the Midwest, California, and the southwestern states, founding and encouraging black Stone-Campbell Restorationist congregations. After entering the Oklahoma Territory in 1891, he worked for three decades as an educator, newspaper editor, social activist, postmaster, and Justice of the Peace. Because he consistently incorporated social and racial issues into his religious writings, Cassius often found himself at odds with whites in the Stone-Campbell Movement, the very people he relied on for monetary support. He advocated a Booker T. Washington-style self-help ethos while at the same time firmly resisting racism wherever he encountered it. Largely invisible in a world dominated by such towering figures as Washington, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. DuBois, Cassius lived a life of virtual obscurity beyond the circle of the Stone-Campbell Movement. His story is important because, as a racial militant and separatist, he presaged the schism that would engulf and fracture the Churches of Christ in the 1960s, when blacks and whites went their separate ways and formed two distinct groups in one religious fellowship.
 
By combing through a plethora of primary sources that Cassius left behind in both religious and nonreligious journals, Edward J. Robinson has successfully reconstructed and recaptured the essence of Cassius’ complex and extraordinary life. This book offers the first full-length study of a man of remarkable attainment despite daily obstacles and resistance.
 
 

Edward J. Robinson is Assistant Professor of History and Bible at Abilene Christian University.
 

“This book is well written and logically developed; the reader acquires an appreciation for the life and struggles of Cassius. . . . Historians have generated telling portraits of early 19th-century circuit riders. This project helps us see that similar conditions remained some 100 years later—especially for African American ministers. It also captures the frustration that black Christians felt with their white brothers and sisters”
—Richard Goode, Lipscomb University
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“Robinson has systematically examined all the extant writings of Cassius and done an excellent job of highlighting the most crucial aspects of his life. This volume does more than contribute to the history of the Churches of Christ. It also confers concretion to American and African American studies in the broader sweep from the Civil War to the beginning of the great Depression.”
—Thomas H. Olbricht, editor of The Quest for Christian Unity, Peace, and Purity in Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address: Text and Studies
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