he didn't quite get it

 

During the 1770s, in the wealthy Rhode Island seaport of Newport, the Rev. Samuel Hopkins preached against slavery. Living in a slave-trading center, Hopkins and his congregation displayed admirable courage in opposing the business that had enriched the town and colony. In 1784 the church even refused brotherhood with anyone who participated in the trade. Hopkins, who considered abolitionism essential to a true Christian identity, regretted that his fellow citizens viewed African Americans in “a mean, contemptable light.”... But Reverend Hopkins could not fully accept African Americans as his brethren and backed colonization to remove them to the British colony of Sierra Leone... When he (Hopkins) learned that a Black congregant had married a white woman, his church excommunicated both, exclaiming that interracial marriage was “Contrary to the Distinctions that God made.” In 1818 Newport’s Episcopal Church explained that “white respectability” mandated that “no colored people be allowed to sit down stairs” with whites.


Yacovone, Donald. Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity (pp. 34-35). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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