In 1888, in Rochester, Kentucky, a preacher named Miles Moss proclaimed he was Moses, charged by the Archangel Gabriel to lead black Americans back to Africa. Around the same time, in Savannah, Georgia, a certain Dupont Bell claimed he was Jesus, preaching that in the coming apocalypse of 1890 black people would be made white and white people black.
Both men, along with other African-American messianic claimants like William Saunders Crowdy (founder of the Church of God and Saints of Christ), James Bedward (a Christ-pretender in Jamaica), and the Reverend Major Jealous Divine (see Sep. 10) are mentioned in this interesting 1947 feature in the Baltimore "Afro American".
