“In order to survive this [being Black in America], you have to really dig down into yourself and recreate yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America.”
-James Baldwin
In September 1919 The Wild West Weekly, a periodical specialising in adventure narratives of contemporary life in the American West, picked up on a story that immediately captured the public’s imagination. An ark – comprised of harbour wreckage, scrap lumber, and donated concrete – was being built on the sands of Terminal Island, Los Angeles. Its shipwright, the magazine reported, was Reverend J. E. Lewis (a.k.a James Edward Lewis), the African-born founder of a new religion called the “Church of God”. Lewis intended to captain the homemade vessel to Liberia and “convert his own people”.
The Wild West tale soon made headlines around America, appearing in The New York Tribune, The Chicago Whip, the Los Angeles Herald, and several other publications between 1919 and 1921.
John von Blon of Wide World Magazine called Lewis’s project “one of the most amazing of modern times”. In his article “The Ship Built by One Man”, Von Blon reported that Lewis–assisted only by his wife–had received numerous donations from a myriad of churches across the United States.
He was deeply struck by Lewis’s resolve.“He may be a visionary,” Von Blon wrote, “but his vision is of the kind that surmounts obstacles.” His faith clearly compensated for his lack of navigation skills. “The preacher works solely from mental plans, explained Von Blon. “He knows how he wants everything to be and goes ahead and does it accordingly.”
As noted by Von Blon and other journalists, Lewis’s most precious cargo would be flock of missionaries. By transporting and successfully settling his American compatriots, he would become a kind of hero of two worlds, spreading his gospel to native Africans, while facilitating commerce and cultural relations between America and Liberia. In a 1921 interview with the Los Angeles Herald, Lewis said that one of the key responsibilities of his evangelists would be to convert Muslims. In the same interview, Lewis also seemed to suggest that the resettlement of Liberia would help bolster the work of the “United Negro Promoters” (possibly a reference to the contemporaneous United Negro Improvement Association founded by the Pan-African activist and publisher, Marcus Garvey).
Lewis’s dream must have resonated with his parishioners, most of whom doubtless saw his Liberian ark as a long-awaited deliverance, a golden ticket to a promised land that until then had remained despairingly out of reach. Racial hate and its hydra-headed manifestations of domestic terrorism and disenfranchisement were a nightmarish reality for all African-Americans. Lynchings were widespread, and perpetrators were often treated with impunity. One of the most notorious had taken place in Waco, Texas in 1916. In grotesque scenes that were later broadcast to the world via postcards and photographs, a white mob seized, mutilated, burned, and strangled Jesse Washington, a Black teenager accused of rape. A similarly barbarous event had also taken place in May 1918, when an enraged, weapons-bearing posse brutally murdered Mary Turner, a pregnant housewife.
This and a jarring number of other gruesome murders, which were effectively publicly sanctioned, helped spur the mass exodus of two million Blacks from Southern States. The rampant racial persecution of the 1910s also probably helped to confirm in Lewis’s mind that American society would not and could not redeem itself. Like the Nephilim-haunted humans of Genesis, whose “every imagining” was “only evil continually”, the country had descended to the point of no return. A radical and divine intervention was needed; a great reset to create a new world. And so, with his Bible as a guiding light, Lewis ascertained his prophetic calling.
At once a vision of salvation materialised. Eastward to the shores of Liberia, the new prophet directed his gaze. It was a country that would form part of an empire for American Blacks; as such, it would become a beacon to entrepreneurs interested in African trade and development. Liberia then, would be the nucleus of African re-orientation and renewal. According to Von Blon, Lewis declared that he would open wide Liberia’s gates “to all the world and establish a civilization that shall be conspicuous”.
Eventually, after some delays and misadventures, the date of the voyage was set for 16 June 1921. Following some remarks on “wicked America”, Lewis and his fellow would-be transoceanic mariners boarded the ark and set sail. Within minutes, the ship capsized, casting Lewis and two passengers into the bay.
Unsurprisingly, the foundering failed to dash Lewis’s dreams. By 1922 he had already taken steps to acquire a 110-foot motorboat. Called the “Angel”, it would be “piloted by prayer”. Over the next few years, Lewis continued to use his business, The Liberian Steamship and Excelsior Mining Company, to fund his Liberian arks. Each investment failed to produce anything seaworthy. In 1927, some members of his congregation, disillusioned with Lewis’s leadership, threw their backing behind Charles Rotero, a Native-American engineer and critic of Lewis’s resettlement plans.
According to the St. Paul Echo, Rotero had “no intention whatsoever to foster a ‘Back to Africa’ movement”. Instead, he planned to oversee a purely commercial steamship business, which would export lumber, canned fish, and other products, while importing Liberian goods such as cocoa and ginger.
Despite his waning support, the Los Angeles Noah continued to both cultivate relations with and lobby on behalf of the Liberian government, whose prosperity he believed was intrinsically linked to the success of African-Americans. In 1933, for instance, he co-authored a letter condemning the United States’ support of the Firestone Company, an American corporation that in 1926 was granted a ninety-nine-year lease to establish rubber plantations on a million acres of Liberian territory. Outraged by Washington’s not-so-subtle imperial designs, Lewis, speaking on behalf of the “Negro Citizen of America and of Liberia”, opined that the “White Man” should not be the “dictator for the Liberian budget”.
Lewis also made news in 1938, when he was named as a speaker at a talk on Liberian and African-American relations. The event, reported the San Pedro News Pilot, would take place at San Pedro’s Mount Sinai Church and feature a Liberian diplomat. Attendees would discuss how the Liberian government could help to plan and “finance the migration” of two million Black Americans. It’s unclear whether the conference produced any tangible solutions.
In the end, and despite Lewis’s advocacy, his Liberian arks–never to cross the seas –remained a thing of spirit. His passion for black self-empowerment, though, which was thoroughly fuelled by his spiritual convictions, did have a real impact. Prophetic in his articulations of greater things, of unseen truths, Lewis inspired not just his own congregation but also the American media, whose members marvelled at his seemingly indefatigable dedication to a colossal task. Ever the Los Angeles Noah, Lewis became a symbol, much like the pre-Flood prophet of the Old Testament, of the exalting powers of faith and hope.
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