This engraving depicts African-Americans sitting, kneeling, and standing, several with their arms raised, as they listen to a preacher. According to the accompanying text, "this scene is sketched from life, and represents the interior of an African church. . . during a prayer meeting." (p. 208). However, the exact same image captioned "Meeting in the African Church, Cincinnati, Ohio" appeared six years earlier in The Illustrated News from New York, which copied the image from a German publication. See image LOC-A on this website. Frederick Gleason (1817-1896) was a writer and publisher. He co-founded an illustrated periodical called Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion in Boston, Massachusetts in 1851. The publication name was changed to Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, after the other co-founder, managing editor, writer and publisher, Maturin Murray Ballou (1820–1895), bought out the interest of Gleason in 1855.

Anonymous, "Scene in an African Church, Chicago," Ballou's Pictorial, vol. VII, (Sept. 24, 1859), p. 208.

English

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

Ballou17-208

North America--Ohio--Cincinnati

"Sunday Meeting of Colored People at Chicago", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed June 6, 2023, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/2272