In the late 19th century, two former slaves turned preachers — Bishop William Saunders Crowdy of Oklahoma and Bishop William Christian of Arkansas — received the same message from God: the Biblical Israelites were Black and African Americans are the true children of Israel. The message was revolutionary, as it subverted earlier theories about the fate of the “lost tribes” of Israel. (Anglo-Israelism, for example, posited that British people descended from the Israelites.) This idea also served to counter a prevailing and racist notion that Black people belonged to an inferior race of people.
“The idea that African slavery in the Americas was not a mark of shame but instead a mark of distinction as God’s chosen people appealed to some African Americans, who appreciated the way the doctrine gave them pride and dignity in the context of Jim Crow segregation that sought to subordinate and humiliate them at every turn,” historian Jacob Dorman writes in “Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions.”