Summary: George Alexander McGuire was born on March 26, 1866 at Sweets, Antigua, in the Caribbean West Indies. As a child, he studied in local grammar schools on the island, then continued on at the Antiguan branch of Mico College for teachers and eventually at the Moravian Miskey Seminary in the Danish West Indies. McGuire pastored a Moravian congregation at Frederikstad, St. Croix, but when he came to the United States in 1894, he chose to be confirmed in the Protestant Episcopal Church. At the beginning of his career, McGuire led small mostly black Episcopal churches in Cincinnati, Richmond, Virginia and Philadelphia. From 1905 to 1909, McGuire served as Archdeacon for Colored Work in Arkansas where he passionately worked to increase the number of missions from one to nine. While involved with the Arkansas Diocese, McGuire wrote a crucial addendum to a book entitled, “The Crucial Race Question OR Where and How Shall the Color Line Be Drawn?” in it, McGuire revealed publicly for the first time, not only his eloquent and learned style, but also the pride of race that characterized his life and the way in which he taught. McGuire reflected that the Episcopal’s record of dealing with race issues left much to be desired and that the affairs of segregation within the sect were so bad, that publicly, both Black Methodists and Baptists openly would refer to them as a “black body with a white head”. McGuire's experience in the Episcopal Church had been tainted with incidents of discrimination against himself and fellow black clergy. He severed his ties with the Church and decided that only in a denomination of Blacks with a Black administration would equality and spiritual freedom be attained. Stating: “The white churches in America had drawn a circle to exclude people of color. Our vision is to draw a wider circle that will include all people.” At its inception the African Orthodox Church took strides to establish ecclesiastical and spiritual freedom for Blacks and people of color.
