While racial context unquestionably affected the way fundamentalists understood their faith’s relationship to the culture, there were nevertheless instances of confluence and cooperation across racial lines that are worth noting. Chapter 4 examines in detail one such interracial endeavor, the establishment of the American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS) in Nashville, Tennessee. As a school affiliated with the nation’s leading black Baptist denomination (the National Baptist Convention, USA), ABTS represented National Baptists’ desire to bolster the availability of conservative Baptist theological training for black ministers across the nation. Partnering with the National Baptists in this project was the white Southern Baptist Convention, which helped fund the school and shared in the control of the institution’s governing bodies. The seminary’s early leadership, doctrinal statements, founding documents, and early controversies testify to a pro-fundamentalist and antimodernist outlook within this institution and allowed (in some cases) for a remarkable degree of interracial cooperation on the basis of shared religious identity. ABTS is a particularly noteworthy case due to the fact that it was much more than the paternalistic exercise that one might expect in the context of the early twentieth-century South. In fact, although white Baptists obviously exercised much influence, the seminary project was designed for African Americans to maintain primary control over the institution by holding majorities among the governing bodies, the faculty, and the administration. The first few decades of ABTS’s existence testify to both the unifying power of a common religious confession as well as the tragic dividing walls erected by a culture of Jim Crow, which even a shared commitment to “the faith once delivered” could not breach.
Chapter 5, in turn, examines another aspect of fundamentalist identity as it came to be expressed and experienced in the African American context—the contested relationship between fundamentalism and Americanism. The chapter serves to highlight some of the divisions within the black community over this brand of religion, as pro- and antifundamentalist forces maneuvered on the rhetorical battlefield of American identity to cast fundamentalism as either supportive of or injurious to various American ideals (and hence blacks’ full participation in the American experiment). In this context, fundamentalism was treated not only as a religious issue, but also as a racial and political issue. Both sides admittedly sought to attain for African Americans the full extent of American citizenship and the rights and privileges thereof, but they vociferously disagreed as to whether fundamentalist religion and identity constituted a help or a hindrance in such a quest. But even as opponents attempted to portray fundamentalism as an albatross around the neck of the race, fundamentalists within the black community sought to weave together these various elements of their identity—as black, as fundamentalists, and as true Americans—in ways that were unique and particular to their cultural experiences in their time and place, as African Americans living under the threateningly watchful eye of Jim Crow.
Thus the progression of the chapters points to the dual reality facing black fundamentalists in the interwar years. On the one hand, they embraced and propounded fundamentalist doctrines, arguments, and polemics, even to the point that some African Americans explicitly donned the controversial mantle of fundamentalism for themselves. Yet on the other hand, their place in American culture as a whole was subject to the overarching white supremacy of Jim Crow, and as a result the actions, attitudes, and activism that stemmed from their religious convictions took on a very different cast from that of their white counterparts. The task of applying their theological convictions to the most pressing issues facing their community entailed that issues of racial justice and equality took a level of precedence unfamiliar to white fundamentalists, and the institutionalized racial prejudice of the Jim Crow era led black fundamentalists to eschew strict ecclesiastical separatism. And even when the lines of strict racial distinction were momentarily blurred by a common religious confession, as in the ABTS project, the strictures of American society drastically circumscribed the boundaries of interracial cooperation, because the single most defining characteristic of any black person in the eyes of the dominant white society remained his or her race. Due to the tensions that arose from these two intersecting realities—the theological reality of their fundamentalist religion and the social reality of the second-class citizenship imposed upon them by Jim Crow—black fundamentalists remained largely ignored by their white counterparts and, until recently, also by historians. The pages that follow seek both to examine this tension and to understand these people on their own terms, thereby offering another level of complexity and variety to the experiences of African American religionists in the twentieth century and suggesting an American Protestant fundamentalism united in essential doctrinal attitudes but variegated in its hues of social action, cultural application, and activist fervor.
1
“Filled to Overflowing”
Black Weeklies and the Fundamentalist Presence
In the weeks leading up to the July 1925 trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, the topic of fundamentalist Christianity was much on the mind of the American public. The trial, centering on John Scopes’s teaching evolution in a public school in violation of Tennessee state law, drew national attention from across the ideological spectrum, ranging from fundamentalist giant William Bell Riley to famed cultural critic H. L. Mencken. Just as the trial ultimately functioned as a referendum on fundamentalist Protestantism itself, so the summer of 1925 represented an opportunity for religionists across the country to reflect on the merits of the fundamentalist perspective and to assess their relationship to it. Into this charged cultural context, less than a month before the proceedings began—on Saturday, June 13, 1925—the editorial page of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, a historically black newspaper based in Norfolk, Virginia, published a column lauding “fundamentalism” as a significant element of African American faith and practice. Having made clear his thesis by titling the column “Our Group Are Fundamentalists in Religion” and confident in his proclamation that “Afro-Americans are fundamentalists, for the most part,” the Norfolk editorialist concluded his piece with the assertion that “Yes, the Afro-American people are Fundamentalists, and they can give a reason for the faith 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.”1
More than simply a declaration regarding the perceived religious conservatism within the African American culture of the day, this editorial drew an explicit connection between the purported fundamentalist proclivities of the black populace and the issue of racial advancement in the legal, social, and political realms. Religious fundamentalism and racial identity, it implied, were intimately intertwined within the African American community in 1925; both were indivisibly linked by the longsuffering quest for freedom that united black Americans across the centuries-long sweep of American history. Yet this editorialist’s claim that African Americans were “for the most part” fundamentalists represents a perspective that