In the context of the Jim Crow era, amidst radical abuse and widespread racial oppression—and in a segregated society that automatically defined black individuals first and foremost by their race—it should come as no surprise that black fundamentalists may have had a different social agenda than their white counterparts, an agenda geared more toward concerns of racial advancement. After all, as renowned sociologist C. Eric Lincoln has noted, the black church has historically functioned as a custodian of African American identity, constituting “in a real sense a universal church, claiming and representing all Blacks out of a tradition that looks back to the time when there was only the Black Church to bear witness to ‘who’ or ‘what’ a black man was.”61 So while black fundamentalists in the interwar period certainly encountered theological conflicts with other segments of the black Christian community, they also applied their fundamentalism and directed their cultural energies to addressing the common issues of racial oppression and inequality that faced the black community as a whole.
At times, fundamentalist voices construed racial progress as actually being a primary motivator driving religious decisions and religious activity. Contrary to the idea advanced by the likes of Ernest Rice McKinney and George Singleton that fundamentalism was antithetical to racial progress, some fundamentalists presented their theological conservatism as a clear means of advancing specifically racial interests. Consider once again the Norfolk Journal and Guide’s 1925 editorial “Our Group Are Fundamentalists in Religion.” This column grounded the continuation of racial progress on the “simple faith” that could help achieve that end: “It has brought us thus far, and the belief is general that it is sufficient to carry us further. . . . We have seen so many radical changes to our advantage in the gradual evolution of the past half century, and we are seeing so much of the like sort from day to day that we see no good and sufficient reason to waver in the Faith.” One cannot help but wonder whether the editorialist would have condoned “wavering” in the faith if the “radical changes to our advantage” that he evidently observed in day-to-day life had begun to slow or cease altogether. In this arrangement racial progress was given a pride of place such that racial considerations were intimately and inextricably tied to religious identity. Continuing in this vein, the editorial concluded with the sentiment that black fundamentalists “can give a reason for the hope that is in them by pointing to what they have become in this free Nation from what they began in the days of the Colonies.” Racial progress was here again linked explicitly to religious identification. Notably, the editorialist also obliquely lent credence to the idea that black fundamentalists’ time and energy was by necessity devoted more to issues of race than to anything else; the race’s tendency to resist the “new paths” that cast doubt on “the Bible as our sufficient guide,” and the tendency to more generally avoid speculation on issues of religious modernism, in the eyes of the editorialist, “may be due in large measure to the fact that we have so many other problems to contend with that absorb our time and dominate our thoughts.”62 So we see here not only evidence of racial advancement being rhetorically connected to religious fidelity, but also an indication that black fundamentalists consciously acknowledged the need to devote their mental and social energy to addressing racial concerns rather than to more stereotypically fundamentalist issues like cultural battles over evolutionary curricula in the public schools.
African American fundamentalists were also shown at times as leveraging their religious identities for racial ends. Such was the case with the aforementioned L. K. Williams, president of the NBC, USA, from 1922 until his death in 1940. In February 1928 several black weeklies published a report on Williams’s attendance at a Baptist ministers’ conference in Washington, DC, at which Williams addressed issues of theology, the church’s social responsibility, and racial interests. The Afro-American made no secret of its evaluation of his theological stance; atop the story’s third paragraph, which began summarizing Williams’ conference address, the paper inserted a very straightforward subheading: “Fundamentalist.” Inasmuch as the speech focused on theological issues, it was “an expression of Baptist doctrines and an affirmation of fundamentalism.” As noted previously, Williams’s “fundamentalist” emphases in this address included his affirmation of “a literal interpretation” of the Bible, as well as his belief in the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the literal reality of Jesus’s miraculous resurrection of Lazarus (John 11). Williams also lauded the superiority of Baptist church structure, which gave individual churches the freedom to do “whatever there is that ought to be done for the community for which the church exists.” He enjoined that all such needs within a community ought to fall “under the tutelage, management and control of the church,” and in turn every church “ought to form a program to cover the entire complex needs of its membership.” Regarding the specific need to press for the social interests of the black community as a whole, Williams opined that black Baptists possessed “a larger opportunity” as well as “a larger responsibility” than other groups—a responsibility that motivated Williams to travel across America “to promote the interests of the Negro race through the Baptist denomination.”63
Williams’s comments in 1928 closely echoed those he made in his NBC presidential address three years prior, in which he had likewise joined affirmations of fundamentalism and condemnations of modernism together with a sense of the Baptist church’s preeminence and an exhortation that the black church must actively press for social and political gains.64 In both cases, Williams was seen as commingling his fundamentalist theological convictions with his love for Baptist church polity, all while keeping an eye on the need, in the words of the Afro-American’s 1928 report, “to promote the interests of the Negro race” by virtue of his religious position. Similarly, Williams was closely involved with the effort to establish, in cooperation with the white Southern Baptist Convention, a black Baptist seminary in Nashville; at the dedication of the school’s first building, he sincerely thanked his Southern Baptist brethren for their assistance while simultaneously explaining that their people’s debt to the black race had not yet been fully paid.65 Williams’s activity offers another example of black fundamentalists linking religious identity and racial advancement in ways that their white counterparts would not have conceived. Such a perspective was a product not only of racial pride and solidarity on the part of African American fundamentalists but also of the ubiquitous racial prejudice and discrimination that they faced on a daily basis, emanating from the white supremacist social structures of early twentieth-century America and institutionalized most visibly in the legal edicts of Jim Crow.
In addition to this connection to the general ethos of racial advancement, two other common perceptions, which were at times voiced in the pages of the black weeklies, may have also played some role in the apparent disjunction between white fundamentalists’ brand of conservative cultural activism and black fundamentalists’ focus on issues of racial import. The first of these was an association of fundamentalism with white southerners, thus linking their battles for cultural conservatism with the concepts of racism and white supremacy. This connection was propounded with some regularity in the black weeklies throughout the 1920s and 1930s, which may help to further explain black fundamentalists’ tendency to apply their religion to racial issues (in contrast to the other cultural concerns driving their white fundamentalist counterparts). Voices in the black press, for instance, would at times link fundamentalist religion per se with southern racial violence and intolerance in particular, even going so far as to conjoin considerations of fundamentalism with