While Mathews’s book represents an undeniably important step forward in considering the confluence of fundamentalism and racial identity, its novelty also reveals and reinforces the historiography’s generally exclusionary trend when it comes to African Americans and fundamentalism.18 Although she does not go so far as to affirm that “black fundamentalists” was a meaningful category, Mathews does convincingly demonstrate that blacks were self-consciously engaged with certain ideas surrounding the fundamentalist-modernist controversy—at least among the four major denominational newspapers that structure her study. Yet in the majority of historical scholarship, black Americans have typically been excluded from considerations of American Protestant fundamentalism, based either on explicit denials that African Americans could even be fundamentalists or on implicit neglect in historical analysis. Moreover, when African Americans do expressly appear in the scope of historical narratives relating to fundamentalism, they often represent either a small sympathetic group to be quickly mentioned and passed over or a bogeyman that white fundamentalists could leverage in consolidating their coalitions. Unfortunately, these sorts of exclusionary perspectives fail to account for those African Americans who consciously self-identified as fundamentalists in the very midst of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, as well as those whose theological and polemical arguments reflected a doctrinal commitment to fundamentalist principles—not to mention those in the black press who presented claims about the widespread presence of fundamentalist convictions and identity among the black Protestant populace. One of the main goals of this book is to incorporate these marginalized black fundamentalist voices into the historiography.
This marginalization of African Americans in relation to fundamentalism in the scholarly literature reflects at least two notable historiographical trends. First, fundamentalism is often understandably construed as an essentially institutionalized political or social movement rather than as a primarily theological undertaking. This position marginalizes those who might have been theologically (and possibly even ideologically) aligned with the movement but whose cultural context and social circumstances precluded overt participation in the movement’s institutional structures. Indeed, many of the most visible and influential fundamentalist institutions and networks, established amid Jim Crow and run by powerful white leaders, often reflected (or even reified) the segregationist and racist sensibilities of the predominant white culture. Thus, analyses that treat these institutional structures as definitional to fundamentalism per se tend to obscure the possibility of black participation. Black fundamentalism, in contrast, was not institutionally defined, but rather existed within extant denominational boundaries and other religious structures. In this sense, it was more a perspective than an institutionalized movement. As a result, the fundamentalist outlook among black Protestants was by necessity significantly less separatist in nature than was the institutionalized fundamentalism of whites, and it often existed side-by-side (albeit sometimes uncomfortably so) with more liberal perspectives within organizations such as the National Baptist Convention (NBC) or the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Such dynamics were for instance evident, as we will see, in the NBC’s seminary in Nashville.
The second relevant historiographical trend is that most academic treatments of fundamentalism consider a militant posture toward certain social and cultural changes that were often associated with the modernist worldview, such as an increasing acceptance of evolutionary biology, to be definitional.19 Yet this perspective naturally excludes African Americans who may have expressly identified themselves as fundamentalists, but whose social focus was often, and necessarily, directed in various ways toward racial issues. In short, if fundamentalism is conceptualized as a movement closely tied to a narrow spectrum of culturally conservative political and social objectives important to conservative white Protestants, and if it is likewise defined by virtue of formal institutional structures, then it follows that African Americans can be safely ignored because they were typically far from the cultural centers of power and the social center of the institutionalized movement, even if they were doctrinally aligned with the fundamentalist perspective.
An example of the first trend—treating fundamentalism as an institutional movement over against the theological specifics of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy—comes in Ernest Sandeen’s The Roots of Fundamentalism, one of the earliest modern scholarly treatments of the subject. Sandeen carefully distinguishes between the “fundamentalist movement” and the more limited “fundamentalist controversy” of the 1920s, noting that “the movement existed independently of the controversy.” He describes the movement as “a self-conscious, structured, long-lived, dynamic entity with recognized leadership, periodicals, and meetings,” possessed of a “self-conscious identity and structure similar to the Republican party, the Knights of Columbus, or (probably the closest parallel) the Puritans.” For Sandeen, the central concern that gave “life and shape to the Fundamentalist movement,” including its institutions, was millenarianism and its attendant focus on the imminent return of Christ.20 Sandeen’s emphasis on the self-conscious identity and institutionalized structure of this millenarian Fundamentalist movement—on a level with a major political party, no less—clearly sets the focus on those citizens with relatively unfettered access to the social and cultural mainstream. Consequently, it is not entirely surprising that African Americans, a group that was constantly pushed to the margins of society in the Jim Crow era, are absent from Sandeen’s narrative. The comparison of the fundamentalist movement with a political party is a striking one when considered from this angle; African Americans were routinely marginalized in the political sphere at this time through disfranchisement efforts, and so perhaps it should not be a surprise to see them excluded from Sandeen’s evaluation of a movement he considers to be similar to a political party in its institutional makeup. For similar reasons, other studies containing a strong institutional focus—such as Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again, which admittedly “devotes most of its attention to the internal affairs of the fundamentalist movement”—largely omit African Americans because of their marginality relative to the institutional forms, though perhaps not to the doctrinal commitments, of the movement itself.21
This perspective is likewise often inculcated in biographical portraits of individual fundamentalist leaders, such as Barry Hankins’s biography of J. Frank Norris, God’s Rascal, or William Trollinger’s study of William Bell Riley, God’s Empire.22 It is pertinent, though rather obvious, to point out that such prominent fundamentalist institutional leaders were white. Figures such as Riley and Norris rightly receive a significant amount of historical attention because they were men of enormous influence—superstar preachers, Bible college founders, radio personalities, conference organizers, and on and on. They were in many ways larger-than-life characters heading sprawling networks of fundamentalist churches and organizations, and as such their biographies naturally tend to paint fundamentalism as a social movement intrinsically tied to these institutional structures. When, as Ernest Sandeen suggested in 1970, the “fundamentalist movement” is seen as possessing “self-conscious identity and structure similar to the Republican party,” the historian’s focus will naturally gravitate toward the most influential and “self-conscious” leaders of the movement, just as political pundits tend to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on highly influential party leaders. Furthermore, an emphasis on the formal institutional structure of the movement naturally draws attention to the individuals who created and oversaw the schools, colleges, radio stations, churches, conferences, newspapers, and associations that comprised the fundamentalist institutional networks; and of course any such “top-down” institutional approach is going to tend to exclude socially marginalized groups such as African Americans.
Trollinger admits in his biography of William Bell Riley that top-down thinking has too often characterized the study of fundamentalism: “William Ellis’ observation, made in 1981, still rings true: while the revisionists ‘have provided a valuable service to historiography by describing the intellectual base of fundamentalism,’ they have failed to give ‘the grass roots of fundamentalism . . . the full attention it deserves.’”23 While his statement was not intended as commentary on the paucity of racial analysis within the literature, there is certainly a sense in which it can be applied to the much-neglected subject of black fundamentalists. An emphasis on fundamentalism as an institutionally defined social movement tends