Abraham Lincoln DeMond

Reverend Abraham Lincoln DeMond (born 1867, Ovid Seneca, New York) was an advocate for African American emancipation. Reverend DeMond, a graduate of Howard University Seminary, was an iterant congregrationalist minister for 45 years. He authored the famous oration "The Negro Element in American Life."

Early life

Abraham Lincoln DeMond was the son of Quam DeMond and Phebe Darrow DeMond. He graduated from Howard University Seminary and was assigned to pastorates in New Orleans, Louisiana, Charles­ton, South Carolina, Memphis, Tennessee, and Montgomery, Alabama. Abraham DeMond married Lula Watkins Patterson DeMond, a Selma University graduate and music teacher. They had four children, Al DeMond, Albert DeMond, Ruth DeMond Brooks and Marguerite DeMond Davis.

Pastoral Life

Reverend A.L. DeMond authored the famous oration "The Negro Element in American Life." He delivered his oration to members of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on January 1, 1900.

The first of January was a day of celebration for African-Americans who commemorated the day that President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation Association resolved that this address by the Reverend A. L. DeMond (given in the church that much later would be pastored by Martin Luther King, Jr.) be published in pamphlet form. DeMond emphasizes that African-Americans are fully American, not African, and therefore fully deserving of all the rights of citizens. DeMond describes the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation as

"two great patriotic, wise and humane state papers…Both were born in days of doubt and darkness. Both were the outcome of injustice overleaping the bounds of right and reason. The one was essential to the fulfilling of the other. Without the Declaration of Independence the nation could not have been born; without the Emancipation Proclamation it could not have lived."

Reverend Demond was a minister in Buxton, Iowa in the early 1900s. It was an unusual community that existed in America's heartland. Originally established by the Consolidation Coal Company, Buxton was the largest unincorporated coal-mining community in Iowa. What made Buxton unique, however, is the fact that the majority of its five thousand residents were African Americans-a highly unusual racial composition for a state which was over 90 percent white.

At a time when both southern and northern blacks were disadvantaged and oppressed, blacks in Buxton enjoyed true racial integration-steady employment, above-average wages decent housing, and minimal discrimination. For such reasons, Buxton was commonly known as "the black man's utopia in Iowa."

References:

Library of Congress American MemoriesThe Negro Element in American Life,"an oration delivered by Rev. A.L. DeMond in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,Montgomery, Alabama, January 1, 1900.African American Perspectives, 1818-1907http://frontiers.loc.gov/ammem/today/sep22.html

http://www.johnpdaviscollection.org

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/murray:@field(DOCID+@lit(lcrbmrpt0e10div2))Library of Congress Rare Books and Special CollectionsAfrican American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P.Murray Collection, 1818-1907

Project Gutenberghttp://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16060

The Negro Element in American life : an oration : delivered by Rev. A.L. DeMond, in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, Jan. 1, 1900

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/buxton-iowa-1895-1927http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress/schbux.htm

Buxton: A Black Utopia in the Heartland by Dorothy Schwieder, Joseph Hraba, Elmer Schwieder