Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1858-1909) was a formerly enslaved African American who became an ordained Baptist minister, educator, writer, and anti-lynching activist. Stanford pastored fugitive slave communities in Canada, and he spent eleven years in England as the first African American minister of a church in Birmingham (formerly Hope Chapel, now Highgate Baptist Church). Rev. Stanford’s championing of transatlantic Black communities included securing access to educational opportunities; attainment of the full rights and privileges of citizenship; protections from racial violence, social stereotyping, and a predatory legal system; and recognition of the artistic contributions that have shaped national culture and earned global renown. He is featured in the new book, The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man, eds. Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini, with Rev. Paul Walker (University of Georgia Press, 2020). For more information on this edition as well as online resources written by McCaskill and Serafini on Rev. Stanford’s life, see our page on the scholarly edition. Scholarly Edition The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man (University of Georgia Press, 2020) Edited by Barbara McCaskill, Sidonia Serafini and Paul Walker This collection highlights Stanford’s writings: sermons, lectures, newspaper columns, entertainments, and memoirs. McCaskill and Serafini annotate his life and work throughout the volume, placing him within the context of his peers as a writer, editor, and activist. Online Blog Posts by McCaskill and Serafini: “Literacy and Education in the Transatlantic Texts of Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Birmingham’s First Black Minister,” The Iron Room, Archives and Collections, The Library of Birmingham, July 2, 2020 “Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford Pushes Back: The Politics of Antislavery in the Early Twentieth-Century Press,” Readex Blog, vol. 15, no. 1, Apr. 2020 Book Reviews: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Peter Thomas Stanford helped champion the cause for civil rights, racial justice, and reform in nineteenth-century America. However, only two of their names appear in history books-until now. The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man is a powerfully written and deeply inspiring book. It is a game-changing story of an incredible African American leader. —Talitha L. LeFlouria, author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South McCaskill and Serafini help readers understand Stanford’s life and work in connection to more familiar figures, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Amanda Smith, William Wells Brown and Henry Box Brown, as well as P. T. Barnum. Putting Stanford’s publications in readers’ hands and providing thorough and dynamic context, they have given a gift that will keep on giving. —Koritha Mitchell, author of Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini have given us a gift. Thismeticulously researched volume introduces us to the fascinating writings of the Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, a prominent nineteenth-centuryblack intellectual and activist who had-until now-been lost to history. Tracing his career across the Atlantic from the United States toCanada to Great Britain and back, McCaskill and Serafini have crafted an exciting biography of a man whose life and activism exemplifies the complexity and dynamism of African American political engagement and literary production from emancipation through theearly years of the twentieth century. —Erica L. Ball, author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class
