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Inasmuch as these newspapers offered a venue for debating the merits and value of black fundamentalist religion, they also painted the picture of a religious worldview largely consonant with that typically associated with the fundamentalist movement as a whole. Staples of this worldview included an emphasis on supernaturalism, biblical literalism, and a belief in divine creation (typically contrasted against evolutionary views), which aligned with two of George Marsden’s three “most distinctive” doctrines of fundamentalism—biblicism and divine creation.35 But despite this significant congruence, the reports and discussions in the weeklies also indicated that some African American fundamentalists tended to connect their religious convictions with issues of racial advancement, and so evinced racially distinct social concerns that differentiated them from their white conservative counterparts. So whereas a seemingly ubiquitous conservative cultural militancy characterized the institutionally driven white “fighting fundamentalists,” African American fundamentalists were more hesitant to make such culturally conservative battles (even on issues about which they may have agreed in principle with their white counterparts, such as evolution) their raison d’être. Yet, at least in terms of their overall religious worldview, black fundamentalists had quite a bit in common with their white brethren.

Amid discussions of fundamentalism in the pages of black newspapers, the rather ambiguous terminology of “old-time religion” was apt to appear with relative frequency, usually without explicit definition. However, the surrounding context typically indicated that the authors or the speakers being quoted used it to refer to at least two general religious views: a firm continuity with the religious traditions of the past and an emphasis on the supernatural aspects of religion. Both of these positions set the fundamentalist worldview in opposition to that of modernism, which embraced religious innovation and a generally naturalistic (as opposed to supernaturalistic) approach to the world. The terminology of “old-time religion” was employed in this way in order to portray a movement tied to past tradition and essentially supernaturalist in character—though, of course, the value judgments surrounding such identifications varied widely based on the author’s perspective.

The manifestation of supernatural elements in the natural world was an oft-implied connotation of “old-time religion,” especially in the context of revivalism and the Christian’s struggle against the sin and evil evident in the modern world. The Henry Brothers’ gatherings, for example, were twice referred to as “old-time revival” services in a 1933 issue of the Afro-American in the context of their stated desire to “wipe out sin and conquer the devil.”36 The supernaturalism of this sort of “old-time religion” entailed not only the purposeful working of God in his creation, but also the nefarious and malevolent presence of an evil spiritual power—the devil—intent on leading men into sinful behavior. The Henrys’ equation of “wiping out sin” with “conquering the devil” indicates the degree to which the immoral and sinful actions of men in the natural world—actions necessitating endless revivals and calls for moral reform, spearheaded by professional revivalists like the Henry Brothers themselves—were tied to the idea of a supernatural tempter who was at the root of the natural sinful actions of humanity.

The supernaturalism of “old-time religion,” however, did not exclusively or necessarily entail explicit recognition of evil spiritual powers in the world; often it was connected simply with the possibility of God intervening in society or in the lives of individuals. In an instance of a somewhat more theologically specific belief in supernatural intervention, a Wichita writer for the Negro Star insisted in 1924 that the Missionary Baptist Church’s ability to combat modernism rested on “a hurried beating back to the path of the Fathers and the Old Time methods of repentance, regeneration, and absolute compliance to the every command of The Christ.” This author’s explicit recognition of “regeneration”—an expressly miraculous work of the Holy Spirit to turn the heart of an individual away from his or her sin and toward Christ—as an essential piece of the “Old Time” religion, as well as his identification of the need for “a fully consecrated ministry prepared in heart by the Holy Spirit,” clearly testifies to the supernaturalism that was in view when the term “old-time religion” was applied to the question of fundamentalism versus modernism. Not only might the devil be constantly on the prowl, as the Henrys preached, but God the Holy Spirit was also considered to be actively and intimately at work in the world. Only those Christian leaders “prepared in heart by the Holy Spirit” represented the hope of the black church to rebuff modernism’s assault on the Christian “fundamentals” and repudiate the modernists’ faithless embrace of such naturalistic ideas as “high criticism of accepted biblical truths.” Indeed, the specific and personal supernatural work of the third person of the Trinity himself, evidenced by the church and its Spirit-led ministers “beating back” to the old-time religious doctrines, was here presented as the only means to “combat” the “insinuating forward movement of modernism in its attacks upon many of the fundamentals of Christianity.”37

It is also notable that the Wichita editorialist’s language and arguments demonstrated remarkable alignment with the sentiments being concurrently expressed by white fundamentalists. Less than two months after the publication of this Negro Star editorial, the fundamentalist contingent of the Northern Baptist Convention (a predominantly white denomination) sent a letter to their convention pressing for the denomination to adopt a stringently conservative statement of faith. The similarity in language between the January 1924 editorial and the March 1924 letter reveal a commonality of concerns between fundamentalist partisans across racial lines. Whereas the Wichita editorialist warned about the “insinuating forward movement of modernism,” the Northern Baptist fundamentalists sounded the alarm about “the subtle and disastrous inroads of modernism”; while the Negro Star writer urged “a hurried beating back to the path of the Fathers,” the white Baptists pressed the need “to restate, re-emphasize, and reaffirm the historic faith of Baptists”; and just as the Wichita author highlighted the necessity of “regeneration” and “a fully consecrated ministry prepared in heart by the Holy Spirit” to combat the modernist threat, the Northern Baptists likewise argued that this task centrally involved not only doctrinal principles such as biblical inerrancy and Christ’s deity, but also a recognition of “the power and sufficiency of the gospel to produce under the operation of the Holy Spirit that regeneration necessary to the salvation and to the spiritual life of our fellow-men.”38 For pro-fundamentalist contingents on both sides of the color line, the supernatural intervention of the Holy Spirit—operating in both the regeneration of individual hearts and the spiritual maturation of the church as a whole—stood as a significant bulwark in their resistance to modernist incursions. In this respect, the supernaturalism that newspaper articles like the Negro Star editorial evoked by associating fundamentalism with “old time” religion, including doctrines such as supernatural regeneration, reflected wider currents of fundamentalist thought that stretched across denominational (and even racial) lines.

Similar sentiments found expression in other African American denominational contexts as well. James M. Nabrit, a National Baptist and the fourth president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary, overtly warned against “liberalism in religion” as one of the greatest “foes” facing black ministers due to liberals’ rejection of “old-fashioned regeneration and spiritual power” in favor of naturalistic ideas of “morality, human goodness and mere culture.”39 The old-time religion once again was linked with both an explicit rejection of modernist theology and an express embrace of such supernaturalistic concepts as the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. This work of the Spirit was connected in turn with the idea of a type of “spiritual power” that lay well beyond the reach of modernists and liberals. Combatting the modernist threat, it seemed, entailed a direct reliance on the supernatural power of the triune God—an idea encapsulated in the appellation of “old-time” or “old-fashioned” religion.

Even the disparaging comments of modernists and religious skeptics pertaining to fundamentalism’s “age-old fetishes” and its stark opposition to modern science indicate that the “old-time religion” was characterized by a belief in the penetration of the supernatural realm into the natural world. In 1930 the New York Amsterdam News saw fit to inform its black readers of a mass meeting featuring an assortment of white speakers, but held by the black Hubert Harrison Memorial Church, intended to advance the position that the tenets of “fundamentalism,” “orthodox Christianity,” and “the old-time religion” (all three terms seemingly used interchangeably) were outdated and antithetical to the modern world. “The spiritual, ‘Old-Time Religion’ is a delightful song,” one Unitarian minister at this meeting argued, “but the idea is intellectually fallacious. Why should a religion that was good enough for Moses be good enough for us?” The teachings of the fundamentalists, he argued, brooked “no reconciliation [with] the known facts of science,” and all the speakers agreed that Christianity must rid itself of its “age-old fetishes” in favor of the “freedom and recognition of science.”40 From this point of view, the “Old-Time Religion” of the fundamentalist was irreconcilably at odds with modernity because it entailed supernaturalist presuppositions that necessarily conflicted with modern science, thus relegating old-time religious fundamentalism to the realm of mere superstitious fetishism.

In addition to connoting a broadly supernaturalist worldview, the “old-time religion” label was also at times applied to black fundamentalism as a means of conveying a perceived continuity with religious traditions of the past. For one AME minister, Bishop Heard, it entailed doctrinal faithfulness to the historical beliefs of the AME Church and by association also to the racial heritage represented by the denomination’s revered founder—renowned preacher, uncompromising abolitionist, bold political activist, and lifelong racial justice advocate Richard Allen.41 The Atlanta Daily World reported that the bishop “made a plea for the church to make a return to fundamentalism as laid down by the founder, Richard Allen, in other words return to the ‘old time religion.’” Just as this report seems to indicate that Heard himself associated his fundamentalism with a harkening back to historical tradition, so the Daily World’s reporter associated Heard in much more opprobrious terms with “obsolete ideas” and a dangerously backward-looking intolerance for new doctrines that were being “laid down by young men.”42 Though the relative value ascribed to such a backward-gazing position differed radically from Bishop Heard to his Daily World critic, it is notable that both men recognized continuity with historical tradition to be essential to Heard’s promotion of “old time” fundamentalist religion. Similarly, a short 1925 column in the Cleveland Gazette lamented the lack of “middle-ground” in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy; in doing so, the Gazette painted fundamentalism as, among other things, “old-timeism,” which was seen as “conservative” and “reactionary” and clearly presented fundamentalists, whether white or black, as people tied to—and usually actively looking to—the past.43 Such an orientation of looking for continuity with past church tradition as a justification for their current theological convictions was often shared by both black and white fundamentalists in their defenses of what they understood to be the long, historically orthodox faith tradition that subsisted through all ages—what the Epistle of Jude termed “the faith once delivered to the saints.”

The broad supernaturalism and traditionalism associated with the appellation of “old-time religion” carried along other particular theological associations as well. Among such common traits ascribed to African American fundamentalists, noted and attested by partisans from both sides of the fundamentalist-modernist conflict, was the conviction that the Bible, as the inspired word of God, ought to be interpreted “literally.”44 Unsurprisingly, a propensity for anti-evolutionism also stemmed from the literal understanding of the universe’s divine creation as described in the opening chapters of Genesis.45 Literalism, belief in special divine creation, and anti-evolution attitudes thus all hung together as a major component of the black fundamentalist worldview as it was presented in the black weeklies.

Perhaps the most intriguing example of the widespread association of fundamentalism with biblical inerrancy and biblical literalism in the black community appeared not in the form of a hard-hitting news report, a golden-tongued soliloquy, or a high-minded public disputation. Instead, it came as a tiny question-and-answer tucked away deep within the children’s section of the October 8, 1927, Chicago Defender. The weekly Defender Junior featured a regular segment of simple trivia questions for kids to answer. This particular edition offered such questions as “What is the ‘initial sack’ in baseball?” and “What is the official abbreviation for Colorado?” It also included the question “In religion, what is the essence of fundamentalism?” The answer, provided at the bottom of the page, was “the literal interpretation of the Bible.”46 The identification of biblical literalism with the “essence” of Christian fundamentalism, without any racial qualifiers attached, speaks to the pride of place that this conviction held as an identifying mark for fundamentalists, black or white. That disputations over the nature of the Bible were central to the fundamentalist mindset is, of course, no grand revelation. More interesting and notable is the relatively unusual context in which this assertion appeared. The fact that the Defender (itself no bastion of religious fundamentalism, by any means) utilized this topic as a part of its children’s trivia game illustrates the universal, indeed almost elementary, nature of this information in the minds of the newspaper’s editors. Whether or not the Defender’s young African American readers around the country knew anything else of the particulars or the nuances of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, they were presumably expected to know that biblical literalism constituted the “essence” of religious fundamentalism just as they should easily know that first base was the “initial sack” in baseball.

Just a week after the Defender printed the trivia question in its children’s section, the paper published a column by George A. Singleton entitled “Religion Worth Having,” lamenting that the black man’s fundamentalist religion, as a mere “hand-me-down . . . from the American white man,” was not fitting for the race: “The form of Christianity as worshiped instead of practiced by the gloriously orthodox and the manifestly fundamentalists is not the type which has abidingness. The Negro group needs religious leaders who will extricate them from the meshes of a crass superstition, literalism and formalism.”47 Chastising black fundamentalists not only for the “crass superstition” of their supernaturalism but also for their devotion to biblical literalism, Singleton identified these two major components of fundamentalism as snares entangling the race. Also worth noting is Singleton’s overarching theme that black religion ought to be deliberately geared toward advancing racial interests—a quality that he considered to be lacking in black fundamentalism and black Christianity more generally. Yet as we will see later on, this idea that religion could be a useful avenue for seeking racial advancement was by no means absent among pro-fundamentalist African American voices.48

Lest we are tempted to conclude that biblical literalism was merely a stereotyped charge leveled at fundamentalists by their less-than-sympathetic contemporaries, we should note that the weeklies also testified that African American proponents of fundamentalism were pleased to claim biblical inerrancy and biblical literalism as badges of distinction. Take for example Lacey Kirk Williams, the president of the National Baptist Convention (NBC), USA, who in an address to the 1928 Baptist Ministers’ Conference in Washington, DC, undertook “an affirmation of fundamentalism.” In so doing, Williams raised two points of doctrine in particular: the deity of Christ and the “belief in a literal interpretation of the [N]ew [T]estament,” including Jesus’s virgin birth and works of miraculous power.49 Nor was Williams new to this particular battle. Three years prior, he had taken to the floor of the NBC’s September 1925 annual meeting to deliver his presidential address, mere weeks after the furor surrounding fundamentalism and evolution had captivated the nation during John Scopes’s trial. Given the summer’s events in Dayton, Williams felt obliged to adjudicate the hot-button topic of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. “The differentiation,” he proclaimed to the convention, “between the Modernists and the Fundamentalists has been very clearly and fairly drawn, and . . . I believe that we should take our stand with those who believe in the full, sufficient authority of the Scriptures in matters of religion.”50 The fact that Williams made such arguments while in a position of great authority in one of the most prominent African American denominations of the day reflects the gravity and the centrality of biblical inerrancy and biblical literalism among black fundamentalists; this issue was evidently no less central to them than it was to their white counterparts.51

Moreover, black weeklies also testified that the emphasis on biblical literalism and divine creation, particularly as such literal interpretation affected their exegesis of the creation narrative in Genesis 1–3, brought the fundamentalist perspective ineluctably into conflict with the rising tide of evolutionary thought.52 Floyd J. Calvin, writing in the Pittsburgh Courier on the occasion of William Jennings Bryan’s death in 1925, lauded the text of Bryan’s final (undelivered) speech as “a clear exposition of the case against evolution and the cardinal principles of the Fundamentalists’ creed.” Keeping in mind Bryan’s role as a prosecutor in the recently concluded Scopes trial, Calvin proceeded: “Thousands refuse to believe that man is descended from an ape, and we are one of them. As for the whole fight between science and the Bible, we stand with the Commoner and the Bible.”53 Calvin’s anti-evolutionism was thus erected, as he saw it, on the foundation of the Bible—and presumably, given his affirmation of William Jennings Bryan’s fundamentalist argumentation, this foundation also entailed the necessity of a literal interpretation of the Bible’s inerrant words in the early chapters of Genesis.

Of course, such rejections of evolutionary theory on the basis of a literalist hermeneutic attracted critical rejoinders geared toward reproving both biblical literalism and fundamentalism per se. While historian Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews has observed that black Baptist and Methodist denominational papers “did not tie the antievolution effort to the fundamentalists in their discourse,” nonreligious black publications displayed no such reservation.54 The very same edition of the Pittsburgh Courier that carried Floyd Calvin’s praise of William Jennings Bryan also included an article from the other end of the ideological spectrum, rebuking the fundamentalists on this very score. “Fundamentalists insist that God created man at one-stroke,” the author wrote, “but how can they explain the fact that man was once as hairy and Simian in appearance as an ape?” Fundamentalists had evidently earned this rebuke by choosing to “stand by the Adam and Eve story,” which was a “Bible story [that] has no facts to support it, while the Evolutionary theory has.” In direct contravention of the fundamentalist appeal to the Genesis creation narrative and the divine inspiration of scripture, this particular editorial posited to the contrary that “God chose to write the story of creation on the face of the whole earth instead of on the printed page.”55

The very same month, an article in the Afro-American took aim at William Jennings Bryan’s outlook in the Scopes trial, criticizing the trial itself, as well as fundamentalism more generally, as simply “phases of the age-long conflict between science and religion,” noting that the same Bible that fundamentalists invoked in opposition to evolutionary theory also “teaches us that the sun moves [around the earth]” while “science claims that the earth moves [around the sun].”56 Such argumentation, taking aim at the biblical literalism that underpinned fundamentalists’ opposition to evolutionary theory, has echoes of another article published the year prior to Bryan’s death in the Journal and Guide, derisively comparing Bryan and other anti-evolution fundamentalists to Don Quixote—“church leaders whose bodies live in the 20th century, but whose minds are still in the 15th century.” The author proceeded to preempt the fundamentalists’ appeal to their “inspired” Bible by declaring that in reality “every stratum of the earth crust is a vast lead in the ‘inspired book’ of Evolution.”57 Clearly biblical literalism and inspiration—manifested most concretely in what one critic panned as “the ridiculousness of the literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis”—were recognized by both friends and foes to be at the heart of the anti-evolution attitude common among the fundamentalists, including those advancing such attitudes from within the black community.58

At the same time, however, African American fundamentalists do not seem to have been as prone to the brand of cultural militancy that characterized the white fundamentalists who have garnered the vast majority of scholarly attention. White standard-bearers such as J. Frank Norris or William Bell Riley elicited the stereotypical image of the “fighting fundamentalist” by their willingness to engage in protracted cultural battles over whether evolution should be taught in public schools, while black fundamentalists hesitated to do so. One reason that historian David Harrington Watt, for instance, excludes blacks from his analysis of the fundamentalist movement is that “few African Americans threw themselves fully into fundamentalists’ campaign to keep evolution from being taught in the nation’s public schools.”59 Likewise historian Jeffrey Moran has identified “white fundamentalists’ emphasis on aggressive cultural battles” as a dividing line.60 While we have seen that numerous African Americans did in fact identify as fundamentalists, and while newspaper pundits on both sides likewise identified a substantial fundamentalist presence in the black community, a common commitment to the basic religious tenets of fundamentalism (or even more specific doctrinal definitions) did not necessarily dictate identical types of political and social involvement.

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 the practices of the Ku Klux Klan.66 In 1926 the Pittsburgh Courier reflected on a recent outbreak of racial violence in Texas by proclaiming that Texas “has always been the perfect paradise for the fundamentalist and barbarian.” Another article in the same edition of the Courier held up Georgia as the quintessence of “arrogant bigotry,” full of people “obsessed with Fundamentalism, Ku Kluxism, and colorphobia.”67 A piece in the Afro-American a year earlier, penned by famous Howard University dean Kelly Miller, had identified the Ku Klux Klan as “composed mainly of Fundamentalists.”68 At roughly the same time, soon after the Scopes verdict, an editorial in the Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, equated the religious fundamentalists of Dayton, Tennessee (where the Scopes trial had been held) with those “who permit lynching and make bastardy legal in order to render their race ‘pure.’”69 Drawing a similar rhetorical link between fundamentalist religion and legalized racism, newspaperman Wendell Dabney expressed joyful amazement that “a Negro who shot a white man in Georgia for stealing his chicken was cleared by a jury”; the triumph of justice in this instance signaled to Dabney that “surely Fundamentalism is about to bid ‘farewell, a long farewell to all its greatness.’”70

Even when the fundamentalist perspective was not directly tied to the South or the Klan, it was often disparaged by opponents as being tightly intertwined with historic racism. In a rhetorical strategy that was not entirely uncommon, Ernest Rice McKinney pointed his readers back to the days of antebellum America, arguing that “it was the heterodox who destroyed slavery in America and England. The Orthodox Fundamentalists wanted slavery to continue.”71 Likewise, in 1926 a Norfolk reporter, having already expressly associated fundamentalism with religious intolerance, concluded that “intolerance and race prejudice sleep in the same bed and are all but indistinguishable.”72 At the close of the decade such religious “fundamentalism,” still largely associated with conservative clerics in the South, continued to be criticized in outlets such as the Chicago Defender as “sectional bigotry opposed to human freedom and adult conscience.”73

Outspoken proponents of fundamentalism within the black community were not exempt from attacks. These old-time religionists were at times accused of holding back the entire African American race. Ernest Rice McKinney, as discussed earlier, railed against the ubiquity within the black community of fundamentalists who worked to “keep us poor, ignorant and weak.” For McKinney, the hope for the race rested in the idea that “some day, we will revolt [against fundamentalist clergy] and then someone will have to get another job or starve.”74 In this brief column, responsibility for the race’s poverty, ignorance, and political weakness was laid largely at the feet of a single group: black fundamentalist clergy. Other writers even went so far as to identify particular religious teachings that were holding the race back. Edward Arbor, writing for the April 1935 issue of the Crisis, was quoted as saying that “being guided by such principles that make one love one’s neighbor, turn the other cheek and ‘take it to the Lord in prayer,’ avails little when opposition is found in masked men with shotguns, closed factory doors, and farmland without seeds to plant.” As multiple news outlets picked up this story, they noted that Arbor contended that racial progress was undermined by the “fundamentalist teachings” of some black preachers in the South who “consigned to hell” militant racial activists.75 That such declamations awaited those who permitted (or were even perceived as permitting) their religious convictions to stand in the way of racial progress and racial solidarity might easily have served as motivation for fundamentalist black Christians to prioritize their racial struggles and racial applications of their conservative doctrine.

A second widespread perception that may have helped motivate black fundamentalists to devote more energy to progressive racial causes than conservative cultural wars was the idea prevalent among many black Christians that true religion required right social action, not merely right theology.76 This theme reverberated all through the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the trendsetting, socially minded Chicago Defender. In December 1923, for instance, popular columnist Roscoe Simmons sardonically observed, “Maybe the Modernists and Fundamentalists arguing about creeds will stumble upon true religion. . . . They may not be much on Christianity, but they are up on theology.” Simmons was convinced that upright social conduct was the essence of “true religion,” which seemed beyond the theologically minded disputants, as evinced by his biting critique: “Suppose they fought sin half as hard as they fight among themselves over creed. This would be a pleasant world, would it not?” Social action, here represented as “fighting sin,” took clear precedence in Simmons’s mind over doctrinal disputations. He resumed the same drumbeat two weeks later, imagining that “looking down from heaven Jesus will say: ‘Look at my children, fighting over faith, when they know that faith without works is as ships without water.’” Without question, social action easily trumped theological considerations in Simmons’s evaluation of “true religion,” as he drew upon the poetry of nineteenth-century Englishman Roden Noel to drive home his point: “What if men take to FOLLOWING where He leads, / Weary of mumbling Athanasian creeds?” Simmons continued on this track in the months that followed, drawing support for his position particularly from John 14:15: “If you love me, keep my commandments.”77

Simmons and the Defender were by no means alone in promoting an emphasis on upright social action. Other figures across the spectrum—from defenders of fundamentalism to its skeptics and critics—likewise saw this as an imperative. As discussed earlier, on the fundamentalist side of things L. K. Williams, president of the NBC, determined in 1928 to travel through the country “to promote the interests of the Negro race through the Baptist denomination” even as he was undertaking an affirmation and defense of fundamentalism. Whereas Roscoe Simmons might have looked askance at this abiding theological emphasis, Williams saw no contradiction. His theological convictions in this context were joined closely with social action designed to advance racial interests, and his concept of upright social conduct was closely connected with explicitly racial concerns.78

Yet even while Williams saw social action and racial advancement as congruent with his theological fundamentalism, other ministers, such as Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pressed for racial interests from a position much more skeptical of fundamentalist proclivities. As the famous minister of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, Powell was, in the words of historian Wallace Best, “one of the earliest African American exponents of the Social Gospel” and one of Harlem’s “chief exemplars of theological modernism.”79 From this position of notoriety, Powell warned in the pages of the New York Amsterdam News that the institutional church was collapsing due to its failure to speak out against “present day Philistines” afflicting the land: “the profit system, intolerance, selfishness, racketeering, exploitation, race hatred, mob violence, unbrotherliness, and every form of injustice.” He concluded morosely that “the preachers are feeding the people on fundamentalism and religious traditions instead of telling them how to get food and fundamental human rights.”80 Where Williams saw a congruity between fundamentalist religion and racial progress, Powell saw a disjunction. Clearly Powell believed that practical solutions to social problems—namely, food and human rights—not the exposition of the theological content of “religious traditions,” ought to be foundational to the church’s faith and practice. Likewise J. Raymond Henderson, a Baptist minister in Atlanta, chastised the “great many folk who are gluttons for what they believe to be fundamentals” yet who possessed merely a “convenient faith” that remained aloof of politics. In reality, Henderson argued, true religion dictates that “the church cannot stay out of politics and be true to its mission.”81 True Christianity, it seemed to many in the black community, was just as dependent (if not more so) on right social conduct in the arena of racial justice as it was on creedal specifics.

At times the premium placed on racial militancy was even more obvious, as in the Chicago Defender piece by George A. Singleton in October 1927, which argued that African Americans needed a new type of religion: “The form of Christianity that is generally embraced by the Negro group makes them servile. The type of religion needed by the black man is militantly aggressive. . . . A religion that makes for manhood, group cohesiveness, solidarity, racial self-esteem, brotherhood, shot through with the very life of Jesus is the religion worth having.”82 The purpose of African American religion, in Singleton’s mind, was to advance the interests of the race, replacing servility with racial militancy, racial solidarity, and racial self-esteem. Indeed, in the context of Jim Crow, the notion of social action on the part of the African American community almost necessarily pointed to the prospect of explicitly racial activism. The pervasiveness of such attitudes within the black community—especially attitudes that promoted social action for racial progress as the test of “true religion”—adds another dimension to 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.