Water channels?

Okay. You guys know what I'm talking about, but I have no idea what they're called. These channels come out of the body of the Jeep just above the tops of the doors, and go from the very top of the windshield to the very top of the lift gate. I guess they catch water from the roof and channel it away from entering the door.

They've got some kind of black coating on them that I can't get off. Some parts of mine are rusting and I want to have it taken care of, but replace that black stuff if I could. Otherwise, just take it off and paint the damn things black.

Any ideas of what I can do?

I call them drip rails. Have you tried a scraper to get all the stuff off? A wire brush?
Mine have no black coating, just black paint.

mine had glued on trim piece that got ripped off a long time ago

I've used a heat gun and a shaped piece of wood to hog out body seams, and never scratched the underlying primer off.
The trick with the heatgun is isolating the heat. But it was inside a trunk, and if the paint fried a bit, so what.

You could use thick heaps of wet newspaper to dam the heat and shield the weatherstripping and surrounding paint. This will take some experimenting though.

Seam sealer is tough stuff, usually a body shop will media blast it off, rather than use caustic solvents.

Aw shit, I misread your post. Nevermind the seam sealer, just spray some aircraft remover on the channel strips and rinse them off after a few minutes.

Aircraft remover will eat practically anything, including you, so wear a mask and eye protection.