The new abolition. : W.E.B. Du Bois and the black social gospel

685 Pages·2015·4.65 MB·English

by  Dorrien

BOOKS BY GARY DORRIEN

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Professor Romeo Phillips,
treasured friend and educator extraordinary
C
ONTENTS
Preface
Illustrations
ONE Recovering the Black Social Gospel
TWO Apostles of New Abolition
THREE The Crucible: Du Bois Versus Washington
FOUR In the Spirit of Niagara
FIVE New Abolition Bishops
SIX Separatism, Integration, Socialism
SEVEN Resistance and Anticipation
Notes
Index
P
REFACE
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
intellectual 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
just enough for me to be caught by the image of the suffering God on a cross.
Christ crucified broke through my everyday horizon of lower-class culture, the
next game, and a bruised psyche. Then the stunning witness of Martin Luther
King Jr. and the civil rights movement similarly broke through, eventually
melding in my thought and feeling with the cross of Christ.
The images of police violence against African Americans during the great
demonstrations in Birmingham and Selma made a searing impression on me.
What was behind the vicious racial hostility on display? My schoolteachers said
the United States was the world’s greatest nation in every way that mattered, and
the greatest ever. But the civil rights movement taught a different lesson.
My lowly school system fell to a half-day schedule, causing my parents to
move three miles west, to Midland, where I consumed library books about the
civil rights and antiwar movements. Later I became a high-profile athlete in a
large sports-obsessed high school, where my politics and autodidactic
intellectualism eventually alienated me from my gang of jock friends. Long
before I understood very much about politics or religion, King was the formative
figure for me, the exemplar of the peacemaking and justice-making way of
Christ. That was the sum total of my religious worldview when I squeaked into
college, mostly to play sports. Forty-plus years later it is still my touchstone.
In college I plunged into social activism and discovered that school could be
interesting. Kant and Hegel put me on track to an unexpected academic career,
although I resisted it, feeling called to ministry. In graduate school and seminary
I studied for the Episcopal priesthood and joined solidarity organizations
working on anti-imperialist and antipoverty issues. Then I worked for eight years
as a pastor, community organizer, and activist in Albany, New York, writing
books that led to a belated academic career.
I am grateful for the immense privilege that I hold in being able to teach and
write for a living. No one in my Bay County neighborhood talked about going to
college or having a “career.” My neighbors and relatives would have repudiated
the notion that being white conferred any cultural privileges upon them—even as
they struggled intently to secure whatever white privilege they could get and
passed it to me. Interrogating one’s racial bias is exceedingly difficult.
Interrogating one’s complicity in white supremacy—a structure of power based
on privilege that presumes to define what is normal—is harder yet. I am torn
between knowing that I am terribly limited as an interpreter of African American
social Christianity and believing that it deserves all the books it can get, even
from me.
Many of the leading figures in this book were full-time ministers, and some
were every-week preachers despite holding day jobs elsewhere. Nearly all were
products of black churches in which the bedrock doctrine was that all human
beings are brothers and sisters under the Providence of a personal God. On
Sundays they preached in congregations for which the morning worship service
routinely stretched long into the afternoon. A three-hour service of prayer,
testimony, spectacular singing, preaching, and call-and-response was customary,
because where else would you rather be? This was where the Spirit blew freely.
This was where the world was differently construed. This was where a better
world was prayed and preached and sung and shouted into being.
This book employs the terms “black,” “African American,” and “Afro-
American” interchangeably, interpreting a protest tradition that prefigured and
influenced contemporary usage. In the 1890s, when the National Afro-American
League and the National Association of Colored Women were founded, these
organizations chose names that were favored, respectively, by the protest-
nationalist and accommodative-integrationist camps. The protest tradition
usually preferred “Afro-American,” while the accommodation camp preferred
“colored” or “Negro.” These were mere tendencies, however. Eminent black
journalist T. Thomas Fortune gave currency to “Afro-American” in the 1880s
and continued to use it during his Booker Washington phase, while W. E. B. Du
Bois usually used the term “Negro.” Moreover, Du Bois favored the term
“colored” to mark his concern for all people on the nonwhite side of the color
line. On that ground he prevailed on what the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People should be called, yielding years of in-house
debates as to whether this was truly the best name for the new abolition
movement. A decade later the “New Negro” movement renewed the term
“Negro” for many who belonged to the protest tradition—some of whom lived to
see usage change again with the rise of the Black Power movement of the 1960s.
I will also employ the term “U.S. American” frequently, when such usage does
not misrepresent the history I am recounting, as a protest against the presumed
ownership of “America” and “American” by citizens of the United States.
This book describes four streams of black social Christianity that led to a
full-fledged social gospel tradition that led to King. It puts Du Bois at the center
of the story, describes founding figures who were wrongly forgotten, examines
their relationships to Du Bois, and argues that the black social gospel itself was
wrongly forgotten. A succeeding book will similarly revolve around King,
beginning with two figures who directly influenced him—Mordecai W. Johnson
and Benjamin E. Mays. For me, the tricky part in these books is to give Du Bois
and King their due without letting them overwhelm the subject. Both books are
primarily about the black social gospel and its call for a new abolitionist