Figure 1.1. A photograph of the Henry Brothers from a September 1933 edition of the Afro-American, reporting on the brothers’ revival services in Norfolk. Used with permission from the AFRO American Newspapers.
Beyond the particulars of their revival ministry, the family achieved a sort of celebrity status because controversial elements of their personal lives—occasionally ignominious and sometimes downright strange—regularly invaded the headlines of major black newspapers, earning them the moniker “the Headline Henrys.”29 The evangelists received a cold reception from the ministers in Boston, for instance. They were “treated as racketeers” because their lifestyle was perceived to entail “too much commercialism, unclean living, drinking, and immoral conduct.” This perception among the Boston ministers was undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that the brothers traveled about in their own “custom built Peerless limousine.” Owning such a luxury car served as a noteworthy status symbol among certain commercially successful black celebrity preachers of the 1920s and 1930s, a way of authenticating their celebrity ministry and reinforcing their social standing in the community; yet for their critics among the Boston clergy, the luxury vehicle represented a level of materialism unbefitting of the ministry.30 This particular controversy remained firmly ensconced on the mundane end of the spectrum for the Henrys, however. On one occasion, Nathaniel G. Henry fell mysteriously and violently ill, leading him to accuse a local female schoolteacher of feeding him a poisoned sandwich.31 At other times, W. W. Henry added his own series of personal indiscretions to the headlines: shortly after leaving the troupe in 1934 to accept the pastorate of Holy Trinity Baptist Church, he was arrested (and eventually found guilty) for drunkenness and destruction of property; a matter of months thereafter he was accused (and ultimately convicted) of impregnating a fifteen-year-old girl; the following year he was found to have fathered a child with an eighteen-year-old white girl—an incident that caused some of his congregants to padlock the church door in an attempt to prevent him from returning to preach, and subsequently prompted the formal revocation of his pastoral position at Holy Trinity.32 As a group of traveling fundamentalist preachers, this family evidently attained a high level of celebrity and notoriety, as they garnered both approbation and opprobrium from the media.
Interestingly enough, the content of the Henrys’ “fundamentalist” preaching was never laid out in the newspaper articles covering their revival meetings. Even as the brothers outright declared that “all of us are fundamentalists,” the theological particulars of their message were routinely ignored in favor of discussion about their style and methods of working a crowd.33 Yet it was widely understood that the Henry Brothers self-identified as fundamentalists, and they were repeatedly presented as such in the black weekly newspapers. The Afro-American, for instance, expressly labeled the Henrys as “Baptist Fundamentalists.”34 And as professed fundamentalists, these revival preachers received raucous welcomes and capacity crowds nearly everywhere they appeared. That type of reception for a group of itinerant revivalists demonstrates that, at the very least, large segments of the black population were open to hearing a purportedly fundamentalist message. This fact, combined with the black weeklies’ testimony to the substantial fundamentalist sympathies within many black churches and denominational structures, suggests that Ernest Rice McKinney may not have been too far off after all when he opined that the black community was “overflowing” with fundamentalists.
Characteristics and Connotations
Inasmuch as these newspapers offered a venue for debating the merits and value of black fundamentalist religion, they also painted the picture of a religious worldview largely consonant with that typically associated with the fundamentalist movement as a whole. Staples of this worldview included an emphasis on supernaturalism, biblical literalism, and a belief in divine creation (typically contrasted against evolutionary views), which aligned with two of George Marsden’s three “most distinctive” doctrines of fundamentalism—biblicism and divine creation.35 But despite this significant congruence, the reports and discussions in the weeklies also indicated that some African American fundamentalists tended to connect their religious convictions with issues of racial advancement, and so evinced racially distinct social concerns that differentiated them from their white conservative counterparts. So whereas a seemingly ubiquitous conservative cultural militancy characterized the institutionally driven white “fighting fundamentalists,” African American fundamentalists were more hesitant to make such culturally conservative battles (even on issues about which they may have agreed in principle with their white counterparts, such as evolution) their raison d’être. Yet, at least in terms of their overall religious worldview, black fundamentalists had quite a bit in common with their white brethren.
Amid discussions of fundamentalism in the pages of black newspapers, the rather ambiguous terminology of “old-time religion” was apt to appear with relative frequency, usually without explicit definition. However, the surrounding context typically indicated that the authors or the speakers being quoted used it to refer to at least two general religious views: a firm continuity with the religious traditions of the past and an emphasis on the supernatural aspects of religion. Both of these positions set the fundamentalist worldview in opposition to that of modernism, which embraced religious innovation and a generally naturalistic (as opposed to supernaturalistic) approach to the world. The terminology of “old-time religion” was employed in this way in order to portray a movement tied to past tradition and essentially supernaturalist in character—though, of course, the value judgments surrounding such identifications varied widely based on the author’s perspective.
The manifestation of supernatural elements in the natural world was an oft-implied connotation of “old-time religion,” especially in the context of revivalism and the Christian’s struggle against the sin and evil evident in the modern world. The Henry Brothers’ gatherings, for example, were twice referred to as “old-time revival” services in a 1933 issue of the Afro-American in the context of their stated desire to “wipe out sin and conquer the devil.”36 The supernaturalism of this sort of “old-time religion” entailed not only the purposeful working of God in his creation, but also the nefarious and malevolent presence of an evil spiritual power—the devil—intent on leading men into sinful behavior. The Henrys’ equation of “wiping out sin” with “conquering the devil” indicates the degree to which the immoral and sinful actions of men in the natural world—actions necessitating endless revivals and calls for moral reform, spearheaded by professional revivalists like the Henry Brothers themselves—were tied to the idea of a supernatural tempter who was at the root of the natural sinful actions of humanity.
The supernaturalism of “old-time religion,” however, did not exclusively or necessarily entail explicit recognition of evil spiritual powers in the world; often it was connected simply with the possibility of God intervening in