Just a week after the Defender printed the trivia question in its children’s section, the paper published a column by George A. Singleton entitled “Religion Worth Having,” lamenting that the black man’s fundamentalist religion, as a mere “hand-me-down . . . from the American white man,” was not fitting for the race: “The form of Christianity as worshiped instead of practiced by the gloriously orthodox and the manifestly fundamentalists is not the type which has abidingness. The Negro group needs religious leaders who will extricate them from the meshes of a crass superstition, literalism and formalism.”47 Chastising black fundamentalists not only for the “crass superstition” of their supernaturalism but also for their devotion to biblical literalism, Singleton identified these two major components of fundamentalism as snares entangling the race. Also worth noting is Singleton’s overarching theme that black religion ought to be deliberately geared toward advancing racial interests—a quality that he considered to be lacking in black fundamentalism and black Christianity more generally. Yet as we will see later on, this idea that religion could be a useful avenue for seeking racial advancement was by no means absent among pro-fundamentalist African American voices.48
Lest we are tempted to conclude that biblical literalism was merely a stereotyped charge leveled at fundamentalists by their less-than-sympathetic contemporaries, we should note that the weeklies also testified that African American proponents of fundamentalism were pleased to claim biblical inerrancy and biblical literalism as badges of distinction. Take for example Lacey Kirk Williams, the president of the National Baptist Convention (NBC), USA, who in an address to the 1928 Baptist Ministers’ Conference in Washington, DC, undertook “an affirmation of fundamentalism.” In so doing, Williams raised two points of doctrine in particular: the deity of Christ and the “belief in a literal interpretation of the [N]ew [T]estament,” including Jesus’s virgin birth and works of miraculous power.49 Nor was Williams new to this particular battle. Three years prior, he had taken to the floor of the NBC’s September 1925 annual meeting to deliver his presidential address, mere weeks after the furor surrounding fundamentalism and evolution had captivated the nation during John Scopes’s trial. Given the summer’s events in Dayton, Williams felt obliged to adjudicate the hot-button topic of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. “The differentiation,” he proclaimed to the convention, “between the Modernists and the Fundamentalists has been very clearly and fairly drawn, and . . . I believe that we should take our stand with those who believe in the full, sufficient authority of the Scriptures in matters of religion.”50 The fact that Williams made such arguments while in a position of great authority in one of the most prominent African American denominations of the day reflects the gravity and the centrality of biblical inerrancy and biblical literalism among black fundamentalists; this issue was evidently no less central to them than it was to their white counterparts.51
Moreover, black weeklies also testified that the emphasis on biblical literalism and divine creation, particularly as such literal interpretation affected their exegesis of the creation narrative in Genesis 1–3, brought the fundamentalist perspective ineluctably into conflict with the rising tide of evolutionary thought.52 Floyd J. Calvin, writing in the Pittsburgh Courier on the occasion of William Jennings Bryan’s death in 1925, lauded the text of Bryan’s final (undelivered) speech as “a clear exposition of the case against evolution and the cardinal principles of the Fundamentalists’ creed.” Keeping in mind Bryan’s role as a prosecutor in the recently concluded Scopes trial, Calvin proceeded: “Thousands refuse to believe that man is descended from an ape, and we are one of them. As for the whole fight between science and the Bible, we stand with the Commoner and the Bible.”53 Calvin’s anti-evolutionism was thus erected, as he saw it, on the foundation of the Bible—and presumably, given his affirmation of William Jennings Bryan’s fundamentalist argumentation, this foundation also entailed the necessity of a literal interpretation of the Bible’s inerrant words in the early chapters of Genesis.
Of course, such rejections of evolutionary theory on the basis of a literalist hermeneutic attracted critical rejoinders geared toward reproving both biblical literalism and fundamentalism per se. While historian Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews has observed that black Baptist and Methodist denominational papers “did not tie the antievolution effort to the fundamentalists in their discourse,” nonreligious black publications displayed no such reservation.54 The very same edition of the Pittsburgh Courier that carried Floyd Calvin’s praise of William Jennings Bryan also included an article from the other end of the ideological spectrum, rebuking the fundamentalists on this very score. “Fundamentalists insist that God created man at one-stroke,” the author wrote, “but how can they explain the fact that man was once as hairy and Simian in appearance as an ape?” Fundamentalists had evidently earned this rebuke by choosing to “stand by the Adam and Eve story,” which was a “Bible story [that] has no facts to support it, while the Evolutionary theory has.” In direct contravention of the fundamentalist appeal to the Genesis creation narrative and the divine inspiration of scripture, this particular editorial posited to the contrary that “God chose to write the story of creation on the face of the whole earth instead of on the printed page.”55
The very same month, an article in the Afro-American took aim at William Jennings Bryan’s outlook in the Scopes trial, criticizing the trial itself, as well as fundamentalism more generally, as simply “phases of the age-long conflict between science and religion,” noting that the same Bible that fundamentalists invoked in opposition to evolutionary theory also “teaches us that the sun moves [around the earth]” while “science claims that the earth moves [around the sun].”56 Such argumentation, taking aim at the biblical literalism that underpinned fundamentalists’ opposition to evolutionary theory, has echoes of another article published the year prior to Bryan’s death in the Journal and Guide, derisively comparing Bryan and other anti-evolution fundamentalists to Don Quixote—“church leaders whose bodies live in the 20th century, but whose minds are still in the 15th century.” The author proceeded to preempt the fundamentalists’ appeal to their “inspired” Bible by declaring that in reality “every stratum of the earth crust is a vast lead in the ‘inspired book’ of Evolution.”57 Clearly biblical literalism and inspiration—manifested most concretely in what one critic panned as “the ridiculousness of the literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis”—were recognized by both friends and foes to be at the heart of the anti-evolution attitude common among the fundamentalists, including those advancing such attitudes from within the black community.58
At the same time, however, African American fundamentalists do not seem to have been as prone to the brand of cultural militancy that characterized the white fundamentalists