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Contested Autonomy: Black Denominational Debates in the Early Jim Crow Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2024
Abstract
As Black church leaders decried the arrival of Jim Crow segregation, many also celebrated the racial independence of their churches. They touted advancements such as women's ordination as examples of what Black churches could do when freed from white control. Other Black ministers defended remaining in majority-white denominations as a way to abolish the color line. This article argues that scholars miss much about Black religious history if we assume that Black churches’ resistance to racial subjugation started with a settled and uncontested racial autonomy. On the contrary, Black churches throughout the nineteenth century kept open a lively forum about the virtues and vices of such autonomy. Interracial cooperation often undermined Black autonomy, and Black Christians debated which better countered racial caste. To track the heated debates over racial independence and interracial cooperation within and between Black churches, this article analyzes Black newspapers, sermons, church minutes, and letters, mostly among Black Methodists but also among Black Baptists and Presbyterians throughout the late nineteenth century. It focuses on particular debates surrounding women's ordination, attempts to unite Methodists, and conflicts over Baptist education.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
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1 Walls, William Jacob, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: Reality of the Black Church (Charlotte, NC: AME Zion Publishing House, 1974), 111–12Google Scholar.
2 C. R. Harris, “Episcopal Dots: Women Elders—Railroad Discrimination—Coleman Factory,” Star of Zion, August 4, 1898.
3 Two small regional Wesleyan churches had ordained women elders before the AME Zion church. For a history of women's ordination in Wesleyan and Methodist traditions, see Schmidt, Jean Miller, Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism, 1760–1939 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999)Google Scholar; Jones, Martha S., “‘Make Us a Power’: African American Methodists Debate the ‘Woman Question,’ 1870–1900,” in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora, eds. Griffith, R. Marie and Savage, Barbara Dianne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 128–54Google Scholar.
4 Examples are too numerous to list here, but a perusal of the Journal of Africana Religions will demonstrate the diversity and complexity of recent scholarship on Black religious life.
5 Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, “Denominationalism and the Black Church,” in Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretative Essays, eds. Mullin, Robert Bruce and Richey, Russell E. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 59–62Google Scholar, 70.
6 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10Google Scholar; Turner, Nicole Myers, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
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9 Mullin and Richey, “Introduction,” Reimagining Denominationalism, 3–5. See Albert J. Raboteau, David W. Wills, Randall K. Burkett, Will B. Gravely, and James Melvin Washington, “Retelling Carter Woodson's Story: Archival Sources for Afro-American Church History,” Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 183–99. For a critique of the term “the Black Church,” see Lawrence N. Jones, “The Black Churches: A New Agenda,” in Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, ed. Milton Sernett (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 491; Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008), 141–76.
10 For groundbreaking work on Black denominations, see Joseph Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. A few, like Reginald Hildebrand's study of Black Methodists during Reconstruction, take seriously the division and competition between Black denominations. Reginald Francis Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). For two good examples of recent Black denominational history, see Paul William Harris, A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church (Oxford University Press, 2022); Dennis Dickerson, The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
11 Keith Harper, ed., American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2008); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, illustrated edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
12 In these books, and even in Woodson's The Negro Church, historians have worked against homogenizing the Black religious experience; this essay is hardly the first to call for a recognition of the diversity of Black church traditions. But the organization of books like Hatch's and Harper's speaks to the enduring power of “The Black Church” as an idea.
13 Eddie Glaude, African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–15.
14 C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 12–13. While Lincoln and Mamiya identify the central tension of racial character, because they limit their study to only those churches that are unaffiliated with majority-white bodies, they necessarily leave behind the debates over the merits and drawbacks of racially independent churches.
15 See Reginald Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring; Harris, A Long Reconstruction, 75–77.
16 David Komline, “‘If There Were One People’: Francis Weninger and the Segregation of American Catholicism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 27, no. 2 (July 1, 2017): 218, https://doi.org/10.1525/rac.2017.27.2.218.
17 James Walker Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; or, The Centennial of African Methodism (New York: AME Zion Book Concern, 1895), 5.
18 Hood, One Hundred Years, 11–12.
19 James Walker Hood, “Centennial Sermon,” AME Zion Quarterly Review 8, no. 1 (January 1898): 5, 8. Much of this sermon overlapped with Hood's denominational history. Hood, One Hundred Years, 5–13. At times, the two share entire paragraphs word for word. I quote from both because the two do vary.
20 George W. Clinton, editorial, Star of Zion, October 11, 1884; George W. Clinton, “To What Extent Is the Negro Pulpit Uplifting the Race?,” in Twentieth Century Negro Literature, or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro, By One Hundred of America's Greatest Negroes, comp. D. W. Culp (Naperville, IL: J. L. Nichols and Co., 1902), 116–17.
21 Benjamin Tucker Tanner, “The African Methodists,” The Independent, January 2, 1896.
22 Daniel Alexander Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville: Publishing House of the AME Sunday School Union, 1891), 9–12, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/payne/payne.html.
23 Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring, xvii. For narratives and analyses of independent Black church movements, see J. Gordon Melton, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African-American Methodism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Will Gravely, “African Methodisms and the Rise of Black Denominationalism,” in Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretative Essays, eds. Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell E. Richey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 239–63; William Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Katherine Dvorak, An African-American Exodus: The Segregation of the Southern Churches (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1991); Harry V. Richardson, Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as It Developed among Blacks in America (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1976).
24 The antebellum desire to separate from white southern churches, coupled with slaves’ long history of secret, independent worship (the “invisible institution”) prepared Black worshippers to assume and assert their independence during the Civil War and Reconstruction. See Dvorak, An African-American Exodus; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
25 Hood, “Centennial Sermon,” 7–8.
26 J. C. Price, “The Race Question in the South,” African Methodist Episcopal Zion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (April 1892): 326. Black Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, and Congregationalists belonged to majority-white denominations. Price also meant to cast aspersions on the racial autonomy of other Methodists—those in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, which held close ties with its parent denomination, the ME South, and also those in the ME Church. In Baptist polity, local congregations are independent and autonomous; so, at least theoretically, any Black Baptist church with a Black clergyman would have met Price's definition as “independent.” But when Price spoke of “independent churches,” he had in mind an organized religious body—national churches like the AME and AME Zion—not the loosely affiliated associations of Baptists.
27 Daniel Alexander Payne, The Semi-Centenary and the Retrospection of the African Meth. Episcopal Church in the United States of America (Baltimore: Sherwood and Company, 1866), 20–21, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/emu.010002588604.
28 Jones, “‘Make Us a Power,’” 136.
29 Harris, “Episcopal Dots.”
30 See Jualynne E. Dodson, Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 125–80.
31 Amanda Berry Smith, “The Travail of a Female Colored Evangelist,” in African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, ed. Milton C. Sernett (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 276.
32 Jones, “‘Make Us a Power.’”
33 Quoted in Walls, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 392.
34 Harris, “Episcopal Dots”; Walls, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 392.
35 Mary Church Terrell, “Woman Suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment,” The Crisis, August 1915.
36 For a good explanation of the logic of Jim Crow customs, see Neil McMillan, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Fon Louise Gordon, Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
37 “Plessy v. Ferguson,” Legal Information Institute, accessed January 24, 2018, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537.
38 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Annual Report of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1919), 77–78. Italics original.
39 “Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles, 1905,” W. E. B. DuBois Collection, Series 1A. General Correspondence, University of Massachusetts Amherst, accessed January 24, 2018, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b004-i092.
40 Hood, One Hundred Years, 161.
41 Hood, One Hundred Years, 159–61.
42 Hood, One Hundred Years, 12; Bennett, Religion and the Rise, 42–70.
43 Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth Century Virginia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) 180; Harris, A Long Reconstruction, 8–9, 32–45, 7.
44 “Race, Color or Previous Condition of Servitude,” Christian Advocate, May 29, 1879.
45 “Colored Bishops at Round Lake,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, August 26, 1875; Emperor Williams, “Fraternal Speeches,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, January 16, 1879.
46 Hood, One Hundred Years, 98–101, 119–22; Walls, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 464–66.
47 Hood, One Hundred Years, 120.
48 Minutes or Daily Journal of the Sixteen Quadrennial Session of the General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Clinton Chapel, Montgomery Alabama, May 1880 (New York: William Knowles, Printer, 1880), 52, quoted in Walls, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 466.
49 Hood, One Hundred Years, 16, 119–22.
50 Martin R. Delany, “An Indisputable Moral Problem,” Christian Recorder, April 29, 1880. Melissa Harris-Perry makes a similar point about Jim Crow as a system of stigmatizing shame. See Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 109–19.
51 “Report of the Ecumenical Committee,” Christian Recorder, May 20, 1880.
52 London Times, September 18, 1881, reprinted in Christian Recorder, October 13, 1881.
53 “A Questionable Project,” Christian Recorder, November 17, 1881.
54 Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell E. Richey, eds., Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays, Religion in America Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 66.
55 J. A. Tyler, comp., Minutes of the Second Session of the Central North Carolina Conference of the AME Zion Church, in America, Held in Charlotte, North Carolina, November 26th to 29th, 1881 (Concord, NC: Star of Zion Job Office, 1882), 31–33, 35.
56 Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Emancipation and the Revolutionizing of Human Rights,” in The World the Civil War Made, eds. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 269–303.
57 Many radical abolitionists in the ME Church remained committed to racial equality long after the end of Reconstruction. See James T. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Harris, A Long Reconstruction, 3–7, 82–91.
58 Bennett, Religion and the Rise, 47–48; Hood, One Hundred Years, 119–22.
59 Reverend J. Braden, “By Lamplight,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, November 23, 1876, quoted in Harris, A Long Reconstruction, 85; “Bishop Foster in New Orleans,” Christian Recorder, February 11, 1875.
60 Revels quoted in Harris, A Long Reconstruction, 83.
61 “Bishop Foster in New Orleans,” Christian Recorder, February 11, 1875; Lucius Matlack, “The Color Line,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, June 15, 1876. Matlack, an ardent white abolitionist and integrationist, made the same point at the 1876 ME General Conference, that segregation was about whites keeping out people of color, not the other direction. James 2:1–5 (KJV).
62 “General Conference Proceedings,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, May 18, 1876, 2–3; Bennett, Religion and the Rise, 115–23.
63 J. Morris Shumpert, “The Colored Bishop Question,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, September 18, 1879; J. W. Robinson, “Do We Need a Colored Bishop?,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, January 29, 1880.
64 Richard Graham, “News from Georgia,” Christian Recorder, August 5, 1880.
65 I. G. Pollard, “The African Methodists,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, September 23, 1880.
66 Quoted from the New England Methodist in “Mistaken,” Christian Recorder, September 2, 1880.
67 “Mistaken,” Christian Recorder, September 2, 1880.
68 R. S. Foster, Union of Episcopal Methodism (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1892); Wilbur Thirkfield, “Methodist Union through Disunion and Its Results,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, July 14, 1892, quoted in Harris, A Long Reconstruction, 142.
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73 The Fayetteville Educator, February 13, 1875; Murray, Presbyterians and the Negro, 177–81.
74 Francis Grimke, “Christianization of America,” in Culp, comp., Twentieth Century Negro Literature, 431, 433.
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79 NCBEMC Proceedings, October 1895, 11ff.
80 The Baptist Home Mission Monthly (American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1898); NCBEMC Proceedings, October 1898, 11–13, 35–36.
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82 NCBEMC Proceedings, November 1903, 13.
83 Ibid., 25–26.
84 NCBEMC Proceedings, October 1908, 26.
85 Washington, Frustrated Fellowship, 133–85
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88 A. E. P. Albert, “The Organic Union of African Methodism,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, December 24, 1891, quoted in Harris, A Long Reconstruction, 136.
89 Glaude, African American Religion, 7–10.