The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel

668 Pages·2015·2.38 MB·English

by  Gary Dorrien

The New AboliTioN
booKS bY GARY DoRRieN
Logic and Consciousness
The Democratic Socialist Vision
Reconstructing the Common Good
The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology
Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity
The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology
The Remaking of Evangelical Theology
The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology
The Making of American Liberal Theology:
Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900
The Making of American Liberal Theology:
Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950
Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana
The Making of American Liberal Theology:
Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005
Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition
Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice
The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective
Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit:
The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology
T N
he ew
A
boliTioN
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel
Gary Dorrien
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund
Copyright © 2015 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015933802
ISBN: 978-0-300-20560-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Professor Romeo Phillips,
treasured friend and educator extraordinary
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CoNTeNTS
Preface ix
Illustrations xv
one Recovering the Black Social Gospel 1
two Apostles of New Abolition 34
three The Crucible: Du Bois Versus Washington 124
four In the Spirit of Niagara 221
five New Abolition Bishops 297
six Separatism, Integration, Socialism 393
seven Resistance and Anticipation 483
Notes 525
Index 613
vii
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PRefACe
This book comes from a deep wellspring of feeling and years of imploring
colleagues, students, and lecture audiences that we need a book on the black
social gospel tradition. There is a growing literature on parts of this subject, but
there is no book on the black social gospel as a whole.
There came a point when I stopped complaining about this situation and
applied the imploring to myself. My work operates on two tracks, ranging across
social ethics and politics on one side, and modern theology and religious
philosophy on the other. As a social ethicist I work mostly at the intersections of
ethics, social theory, and politics, and as a historical theologian I work mostly at
the intersections of modern religious and philosophical thought. Friends have
noted pointedly, when I start up about the book that we need, that I have
analyzed aspects of the black social gospel on both sides of my work. Surely,
they reasoned, I was ready to see this subject through.
Surely I care about it too much not to see it through; whether I am ready is
hard to say. This book’s subject is distinctly important to me and is long abiding
in me. I was an aspiring four- sport athlete in a semirural, lower- class area in
mid–Michigan Bay County when the civil rights movement exploded into its
climactic phase in the early 1960s. My parents, Jack and Virginia Dorrien, had
come from similarly poor areas in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where my
father’s Cree heritage made him a target of racial abuse. He became passably
white by moving away, and raised his five sons as definitely white, never mind
that we had obviously Native American relatives.
All my life I have been a jock with a mystical streak and autodidactic intel-
lectual tendencies. In my youth I was a voracious reader, though never of
schoolbooks. Fortunately I played sports year- round, which forced me to earn
passing grades at school. My family, though not religious, got to Catholic Mass
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