06/01/2026
Read
Did you know the religious arm of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was led by what was then called a group of “Renegade Episcopal Priests”?
Read more about George Alexander McGuire and how the African Orthodox Church came into being. Marcus Garvey attended an Anglican school supported by the Church of England. From some accounts he was reared Methodist but converted to Catholicism. Garvey’s Christianity was Africanist in ideology while retaining many of the organizational structures common to both Episcopalianism and Catholicism. Very interesting history.
History-
Father McGuire is the founder of the African Orthodox Church, a body for Negro Episcopalians dissatisfied with the Episcopal Church. He was born in Antigua, British West Indies, and graduated from the Moravian Theological Seminary, St. Thomas Island. He came to the United States in 1894, and was ordained deacon on June 29, 1896, and priest on Oct. 22, 1897. After ministries in Cincinnati, Richmond, and Philadelphia, he became archdeacon of the Convocation of Arkansas, a convocation for African American Episcopalians. He served as field secretary for the American Church Institute for Negroes. In 1919 he joined the work of Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association of the World. On Sept. 2, 1921, he organized the African Orthodox Church, and on Sept. 28, 1921, he was ordained and consecrated bishop by Joseph Rene Vilatte, an episcopi vaganti. He died in New York City.
The African Orthodox Church
The beginning of the twentieth century saw a strong movement for the dignity of Americans of African descent, with scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois and anti-lynching journalist-activists such as Ida B. Wells playing prominent roles on the national scene. In part this was because of the imposition of legal segregation and disfranchisement, which became stronger and more widespread at the turn of the century. Unfortunately the mainstream churches were not immune to these trends, and a number of priests of the Protestant Episcopal Church in particular grew increasingly dissatisfied with their marginalization.
One of these was George Alexander McGuire, a native of Antigua in the British West Indies. He received his theological education at the Moravian seminary on St. Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands), and was later ordained deacon and priest by the Episcopal Church, serving throughout the northeastern United States. He, like many people of color at the time, was strongly influenced by Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. McGuire served as a chaplain for the UNIA.
Eventually McGuire, with a number of parishioners and fellow Episcopal clergy, decided that they needed to withdraw from the Protestant Episcopal Church whose racial ideologies they found oppressive. They assembled in synod in New York in 1921 and decided, naturally, to maintain an episcopal form of church organization and a sacramental system of worship, holding to the apostolic faith of the early councils. They also resolved not to subject themselves ever again to a white hierarchy. This necessitated obtaining their own bishops, and after some extended negotiations, Archbishop Lloyd agreed to ordain their elected candidate, Fr. McGuire, to the episcopacy.
