Stories · Dignity in the face of discrimination

A voice of equal worth: Amanda Berry Smith and the freedom to belong

6 min read, approximately

If therefore the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.John 8:36 (Freedom) · WEB

A woman near the door

Amanda Smith sat about three rows from the entrance. She had arrived at Green Street Church tired, after preparing food and arranging care for her children. She was not a celebrated guest. She was a Black woman who earned money washing clothes, and that morning, as she later remembered it, she could see no other Black person among the people gathered there.

Her 1893 autobiography preserves the ordinary scale of the struggle. Before the sermon there had been a household to manage, an older daughter looking after the baby, and the prospect of her husband’s displeasure if he returned while she was away. There was also a spiritual longing she could not satisfy by making more effort. She wanted a life surrendered to Christ, but wondered how to sustain it amid work, family tension, and her own temperament.

Those circumstances did not disappear that Sunday. What began to change was the position from which Amanda understood herself. The exhausted woman who had come through the door would describe that morning as a decisive moment in her inward freedom.

Weariness with a history

She had been born into slavery in Maryland in 1837. That matters: her difficulty speaking in the presence of white people did not arise in a neutral world. Society had established hierarchies that treated skin color as a supposed measure of human worth. Her later Christian testimony developed within that history, not outside it.

In her memoir, Amanda also refuses to conceal the troubles of her first marriage. She had married young; the early promises did not prevent difficulties connected with her husband’s drinking. Her first child died. The daughter who survived, called Mazie in the narrative, remained part of her household through those years of labor and searching.

In 1855 Amanda became seriously ill. She understood her recovery in connection with a spiritual experience she described as a vision; that account belongs to her testimony, rather than providing a medically established explanation. She placed her conversion in the following year. Faith did not begin for her with public recognition. It took shape amid illness, bereavement, and an inward resistance she recounts without trying to make herself look flawless.

She did not know how to rest

Long after that conversion, she still wondered how to live the holiness she heard people preach. She had tried to understand it as something she must reach through sufficient preparation. If she could do everything necessary, she thought, the assurance she sought would finally arrive. Yet the goal seemed to recede with every fresh anxiety.

Her laundry work helps explain the weight of that question. Amanda writes that during the week she dried clothes inside the house and tried to keep them from absorbing cooking smells. Sunday offered the chance to prepare a better meal. To attend worship, she had to arrange in advance responsibilities that other people might scarcely notice.

The narrator of her memoir does not separate that household economy from her life with God. Clothes, rent, food, and children appear alongside prayer. Her tiredness was not an invented illustration for a sermon; it was the actual ground on which she searched. When she heard John Inskip speak about someone finishing a day exhausted, she recognized something she knew intimately.

Grace did not need an all-night guard

Inskip preached about the new self described in Ephesians. In Amanda’s recollection, a simple comparison opened a door: someone who goes to bed weary does not have to consciously organize every breath while sleeping. The preacher used that image to explain a trust that does not consist in keeping God present through relentless personal effort.

Amanda understood the teaching as an invitation to stop being the sole guardian of her spiritual life. She describes peace, love, and an intense awareness of divine presence. Her language belongs to the holiness movement in which she participated. We can listen to it as her account of experience without requiring every reader to undergo identical emotions.

But joy encountered another barrier. She wanted to express gratitude and feared being put out of the church. In her memoir she connects that fear with being the only Black person present. This was not merely the shyness of someone unaccustomed to speaking publicly. Beneath that silence lay an inequality learned over many years.

A sentence that challenged a hierarchy

Near the end of worship, Amanda managed to stand by holding the pew before her. As the congregation sang about Christ, she voiced her praise. Inskip responded affirmatively. She also remembered words from Galatians acquiring a new clarity: her belonging to Jesus did not hold a lower rank than the belonging of the people around her.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”Galatians 3:28 · WEB

Amanda did not take that unity to mean pretending racism did not exist. Her own book shows how powerfully it continued to matter. What she describes is that hierarchy losing its inward authority: other people’s whiteness could no longer determine her worth before Christ.

Returning home, she found the baby asleep and spoke with Mazie. Then she wanted to share her joy with people in her community. Not everyone responded enthusiastically. A cool reply shook her again, and her memoir preserves that episode too. Newly discovered confidence did not make her immune to rejection.

Another detail prevents the account from becoming an easy formula: Amanda acknowledges that difficulties with her husband did not automatically improve. Her religious experience did not magically reorganize someone else’s behavior. The inward freedom she celebrated still had to be lived in a difficult world.

A voice beyond the laundry room

In time, that woman became an itinerant evangelist. She traveled to England in 1878 and also worked in India and Africa. Later she devoted effort to caring for African American children in need in Illinois. Those developments widened the reach of her service, but they do not make the woman preparing food and washing clothes before church insignificant.

That is precisely where her testimony draws its strength. Amanda’s worth did not begin when other people agreed to hear her from a platform. Her dignity did not depend on an invitation, a journey, or recognition from influential listeners. The Green Street account shows how faith in Jesus Christ challenged a silence that could appear natural only because it had been imposed for so long.

For us, the narrative also leaves a responsibility. Admiring people who managed to speak despite exclusion is not enough; we can examine whose voices we still treat as secondary. A community proclaiming unity in Christ must make practical room for listening, serving, and correcting its prejudices.

Amanda left that service without any guarantee that life would become simple. She left with a conviction that, in her own account, would accompany her: she did not have to become someone else to be received by Jesus. The woman who had occupied a place near the door had a voice as well, and that voice had something to share.

May God continue to bless you, and may you have a wonderful day in Jesus Christ!
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