Black Fundamentalists. Daniel R. Bare

the black fundamentalists’ precarious position. That is, their continuous experience of racial oppression, in conjunction with both their community’s emphasis on social action as a mark of true religion and the potential association of fundamentalism with anti-black racism, led them to contextualize their religious convictions within the necessary and ever-pressing task of promoting the interests of the race as a whole.

      Figure 1.2. Reverend John L. Henry leading his congregation to sign a petition for antilynching legislation. Used with permission from the AFRO American Newspapers.

      A parting image may serve to reinforce the point. On March 30, 1935, the Afro-American printed a photograph on its front page captioned “Churchgoers Sign Up,” showing the Reverend John L. Henry, formerly of the Henry Brothers’ traveling revival troupe, who had since accepted the call to become the pastor of Tenth Street Baptist Church in the nation’s capital. In the photo, Henry was leading a long line of his congregants out the door of Tenth Street Church and toward a petition booth in front of the building. There the reverend and the rest of his congregation readily signed a petition in favor of the Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill.83 While J. L. Henry had very conspicuously identified himself as a fundamentalist during his days as an itinerant revivalist, on this day he made the front page of the paper not for his preaching or for his theology but rather for his willingness to lead his congregation to jointly engage in progressive social action on behalf of the race. Henry stood ready to proclaim a brand of “fundamentalism” in his family’s revival meetings, and he may well have done the same from the pulpit of Tenth Street Baptist, yet on this day this purportedly fundamentalist clergyman led his congregants to stand up and fight also for racial justice.

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      There is little doubt that the African American community has received far too little attention in the historiography of American Protestant fundamentalism. Indeed, the very existence of black fundamentalists has been overlooked by a good many commentators. According to the testimony of the black weekly newspapers, not only did a number of African Americans claim for themselves the “fundamentalist” label, but they also shared some notable characteristics with their white counterparts: a supernaturalist perspective, an emphatic continuity with religious traditions of the past, a belief in biblical inspiration and inerrancy, a “literalist” hermeneutic, an emphasis on divine creation, and an attitude of hostility toward evolutionary thought. Yet as we have seen, one major difference lay in the fact that the conservative brand of cultural militancy so long held to be an essential defining characteristic of fundamentalism—that is, the willingness among white fundamentalists to engage in protracted and heated cultural battles against the perceived cultural changes that accompanied modernism, such as the struggle to keep evolution out of public school curricula—was often absent (at least as a first-order concern) among conservative black Christians. Instead, for black fundamentalists the pressing racial issues facing them from all sides often meant that their social outlook centered more on the progressive politics of racial advancement than on the conservative social and political agendas of white fundamentalists. If the broadly conceived religious worldview of fundamentalism offered a degree of commonality for its adherents across racial lines, the oppressive disparities imposed on black Americans by Jim Crow racism assured that social accord was not so readily forthcoming.