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by Jeffrey P. Moran THE ANTI-EVOLUTION MOVEMENT OF THE 1920s DEMONSTRATED THAT SOME aspects of Protestant fundamentalism flourished with particular vigor in the American South. Although fundamentalism, like the anti-evolution movement itself, originated in the North and Midwest, some southern states provided significant popular and legislative support, particularly in the area of scientific education, including Tennessee's infamous Butler Act proscribing the teaching of evolution, a 1928 referendum in Arkansas that also banished the topic from public schools, and similar limitations imposed by countless local school boards. Not by mere coincidence did William Jennings Bryan frequently cultivate anti-evolution sentiments in the fertile soil of the Bible Belt. Southern Protestantism and fundamentalism shared many social and theological foundations. Yet this common picture of fundamentalism leaves out one major group of southern Protestants: African Americans. Despite the African American exodus from white-dominated denominations in the decades after emancipation, black and white southerners shared a common religious heritage marked by revivalism, conservative biblical beliefs, and often a sense of premillennial pessimism about the state of the world. It would have seemed natural for African Americans to be just as interested in the fundamentalist message as some of their white coreligionists were. However, the Scopes trial of 1925 demonstrated that black and white Protestants in the South differed in significant ways. Some conservative white evangelicals shifted to support fundamentalist Protestantism, leaving their black brethren upholding once-shared beliefs but rejecting the white fundamentalists' emphasis on aggressive cultural battles. (1) Despite conservative interpretations of the Bible among most African Americans and the best efforts of a handful of self-proclaimed black fundamentalists, few African American Christians traveled the path that led from conservative theology to militant righteousness. Ironically, the same southern heritage that predisposed black southerners to conservative biblical belief also prevented them from following some of their white brethren into a fundamentalist crusade to purge the churches and society of impurity. The determination of whether black and white southerners became fundamentalists depends in part on the definition of fundamentalism. The formal movement commenced with the founding of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) in 1919 under the leadership of white Minnesota minister William Bell Riley, but fundamentalism's organizational genesis says little about its content and character. Historians have generally moved beyond the early view--put forth by scholars for whom the anti-evolution controversy was still a live issue--that fundamentalism was a rearguard action by dispossessed rural Americans uncomfortable with education and scientific progress. Instead, scholars in the last three decades have examined the tenets of fundamentalist theology, the movement's roots in the nineteenth century, and the social and structural contexts in which fundamentalism thrived. (2) At a basic level, fundamentalists were united by their adherence to a conservative theology. In the 1910s an emerging fundamentalist theology categorized as true Christians only those who believed five or six central doctrines. An overarching belief in the inerrancy of Scripture sheltered all the other fundamental tenets, including the virgin birth of Jesus, his sacrifice to atone for human sin, his bodily resurrection, and either the authenticity of biblical miracles or the inevitability of Jesus's return to earth to usher in a millennium of peace. These beliefs increasingly marked adherents as fundamentalists after the turn of the twentieth century, as science seemed to call into question most biblical miracles and so-called liberals and modernists in the churches began to call for a less literal interpretation of the Bible. (3)
| However, conservative theology did not a fundamentalist make. The historian George M. Marsden maintains that fundamentalists became distinct not so much for their theology as for their militancy in seeking to return the churches and the nation to righteousness. Fundamentalism, in Marsden's interpretation, was forged in the crucible of the Great War when previously apolitical evangelicals came to believe that theological liberalism and its putative ally, materialism, were responsible for German military aggression. (4) In the superheated atmosphere of wartime and postwar conversion, conservative American evangelicals consecrated themselves to a crusade against German-inspired nihilism in both the churches and the wider culture. This militancy gained additional strength from the fundamentalists' sense of lost cultural influence. Marsden and other scholars have noted that revivalism dominated American evangelical religion before the twentieth century, nurturing powerful strains of biblical literalism, primitivism, and activism. In the absence of a state church, American evangelicals had been able to achieve dominance in the culture in a way that their English counterparts, for example, had not. (5) Revivalist Protestants set the tone for American culture in the nineteenth century--they led movements for reform, shaped the discussion of public and private issues, and identified their religious beliefs with the character of the nation. When secularism, scientific expertise, and modernism gained influence in the early twentieth century, white American evangelicals reacted with the anger of a group that had lost its once-unquestioned authority. In the early 1920s much of the fundamentalist discontent focused on the issue of evolutionary theory, which supporters and detractors often labeled simply Darwinism. (6) Participants in the crusades against evolution clearly aligned themselves with fundamentalist goals. Some fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan denounced evolution for providing a rationale for warfare and for buttressing what came to be known as Social Darwinism. But above all, evolutionary theory provoked conservative Christians because it threatened to erode faith in God. The doctrine of evolution contradicted the account of miraculous creation in the Bible, and the scientific focus on mechanistic and naturalistic explanations seemed to leave no place for those moments when God suspended the laws of nature to allow for the virgin birth, for example, or to raise Jesus from the dead three days after the Crucifixion. If Christians could not trust the Bible's account of the creation, many fundamentalists asked, how could they believe its account of Jesus's redemption of humanity from sin? The question involved more than geology and biology; an eternal plan of salvation was at stake. Despite originating with conservative theologians in the North, fundamentalism adapted well to the southern climate. Conservative ideas could thrive when isolation and poverty fed them. By 1906 over half of all white church members in the South were affiliated with one of the three major regional denominations, such as the Southern Baptists. With the exception of Catholics, most other churched whites belonged to independent congregations that had no connections outside the local area, let alone the region. Thus, the vast majority of southern churches never felt the winds of modernism blowing from Europe and the North--most of the Scopes jurors, for example, had been unaware of the theological dispute over evolution until the test case arose in Tennessee. Compounding this isolation was the grinding poverty of the post-Civil War South. Little money was available for training ministers even at the rare theological seminaries that managed to survive for more than a few years, and the South in general did very little to support public education for black or white students. "[B]oth leadership and response," notes one historian of southern religion, "carried the stamp of intellectual backwardness." (7) Ministers and congregants in the South were often unaware of the theological struggles that shook the northern churches, but as leading fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan, J. Frank Norris, and T. T. Martin began early in the 1920s to publicize the dangers of modernism and Darwinism in a series of massive revivals throughout the region, southern white Protestants volunteered in great numbers to fight for the old-time religion. In much of the South, then, it was only the anti-evolution crusade and the Scopes trial that made conservative white Protestants aware that they shared many fundamentalist beliefs. (8) They were not alone in their rejection of modern scientific findings. Just as the anti-evolution movement provoked many white Protestants to declare publicly that they were fundamentalists, so the Scopes trial inspired many African Americans to make public professions of their faith. Whether they were part of the growing diaspora of blacks in the North or lifetime residents of the South, a great many members of the race in the summer of 1925 identified themselves as fundamentalists and anti-evolutionists. They paralleled their white counterparts in many, but not all, respects. Although leading evolutionists were often deeply involved in eugenics and scientific racism, African American anti-evolutionists never cited Darwinism's use by racists as an argument against the theory. While rehearsing the standard scientific and theological critiques of evolution, however, African Americans did suggest that maintaining a conservative Christian faith was uniquely important for the advancement of the race. African Americans north and south expressed opposition to the theory of evolution. Ministers delivered sermons with titles such as "Darwin's Monkey Theory versus God's Man Theory" and "Bible Versus Evolution" (text: "Obey God"). The National Baptist Convention, with five thousand delegates at its annual meeting in Baltimore in September 1925, passed resolutions against both the Ku Klux Klan and evolution. (9) African Americans pledged their allegiance to the Bible rather than Darwin in letters and occasionally in poems published in the black press. Baltimore's Thelma L. Sullivan sent six quatrains to the Afro-American confessing that she "humbly must confess, / This evolution stuff a mess." | |
For from beginning unto the end,
We'll never know the make of man.
So take advice, dear friends, from me,
Let God and all of His works be.
For had He wanted you to know,
He would have said so long ago,
And so helped scientists to know
The model of your being.
So, do not question any more,
If we were always men of monkeys before;
For when we leave this world below,
To our creator we will go. (10)
| | For believers as devout as Thelma Sullivan, William Jennings Bryan's service in the Scopes trial even came to outweigh his notoriously poor reputation in racial matters. During the anti-evolution controversy many African Americans decided that Bryan's work as the champion of "revealed religion" atoned for his earlier errors. "For the first time in the history of his life's great battles," observed the Norfolk Journal and Guide, "he attracted the sympathetic feelings of a large portion of Colored America when he championed fundamentalism at the Scopes trial. Negroes, being by far and large, fundamentalists in religion, naturally found themselves in this one instance on Bryan's side." (11) Anti-evolutionism could make for strange bedfellows. In justifying their stand against evolution, many African American Christians shared the standard arguments also made by white fundamentalists. The Reverend R. L. Holley, educated at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College and called to the pulpit of the Temple Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama, offered a typical fundamentalist indictment of evolution's scientific validity. Like Bryan, Holley invoked the Baconian ideal of science as "demonstrated facts" and denied that the evolutionary hypothesis rose to this standard. "Since evolution is not a fact then it must be a theory," the minister explained, "and no mere theory can be a true science." Holley told his congregation that scientists such as Henry Fairfield Osborn confessed that science could shed little light on the matter of the origins of life, and the minister cited the august (and long dead) Nathaniel Southgate Shaler of Harvard in opposition to the idea that natural selection could generate novel life-forms. Compared to the uncertainty and speculation that permeated evolutionary accounts, the Bible offered a "plain statement" of "how man came to this planet." Similarly, the Reverend A. A. Graham, corresponding secretary of the Baptist Lott Carey Missions, maintained it was more reasonable to believe that "some intelligent designer" produced all forms of life than to place faith in evolutionary speculation that hung "on a thread of probability so fragile it can be broken into a thousand pieces by the weakest kind of reasoning." (12) Other ministers offered briefer theological arguments against evolution, generally centering on the question of how humankind acquired a soul. "There couldn't be any relation between man and monkey," noted Rev. A. B. Callis of Baltimore. "A monkey has no soul, therefore has no salvation. But man has both a soul and a salvation." The Reverend Elizabeth Green of Nelson Memorial Church in the same city likewise refused to reconcile her belief that God breathed life and "a living soul" into man with the idea that humans could ever be "evolutionized." (13) To some extent, such professions of anti-evolutionist sentiment were color-blind. A common reliance on Baconian science and biblical revelation still linked some congregations across the racial divide. More often, African American anti-evolutionists introduced distinctive notes about race into their discussions of Darwinism. As the A.M.E. Church Review hardened its anti-evolution stance in the fall of 1925, its editorials and articles often featured race-conscious justifications for anti-evolutionism. In October, for example, it published a peculiar anti-evolution essay by John W. Norris, an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) minister in Baltimore. Norris rehearsed a number of philosophical conundrums about the finitude of space and the irreconcilability of evolution with the biblical account of God creating each creature to reproduce "after his or their own kind." He then addressed his black audience more directly. Slavery was wrong, Norris argued, "because man was never made to be a slave." On the contrary, God created man "to rule all other creatures." The Lord made man "a special brain-case creature" to help him rule over others. Humans therefore could not have evolved from animals, for humans could not descend from the creatures they ruled. The essay betrayed signs of the author's intellectual isolation--Norris maintained that God had engaged in Adamic creations on "trillions of globes" throughout the universe--but it also suggested that anti-evolutionism could have particular meanings for African American Christians. (14) Other African American ministers found a more concrete message for the race in the anti-evolution controversy. Dr. E. W. White, pastor of Houston's powerful Tulane Avenue Baptist Church, preached on the topic "Plenty monkey but more hog in man" to one of that church's largest crowds ever. White began conventionally enough, informing his congregation that evolutionists were engaged in "an old scheme of the devil" to deny all of Genesis and other biblical miracles. But White also believed that "the Negro is religious by nature" and thus unlikely to fall into the modernists' snare. The minister therefore took his sermon in a different direction. "Man did not descend from a monkey," White said, "but from many of his actions he has descended to a monkey." Evidence was all around. "Look at the man living with no aim, like a monkey with a cocoanut [sic], perfectly satisfied. Tanking up on 'rot gut' stuff, running wild in automobiles, endangering lives--monkey ways." Even these simian attributes, White suggested, paled next to the "hog" in man. "When man wants to get the whole world and a fence around it, that's the hog in him," the minister explained. "Why is it men and women shun places of decency and places of uplift for the dives?" he asked. "That is the hog instinct that likes filth." Although White addressed a vexing theological issue, he held on to the African American religious tradition of exhorting righteous living rather than engaging in arid theological disputes. (15) Several African American observers felt that a continued belief in biblical inerrancy was particularly important for the race. In one of his editorials touching on the Scopes trial, Howard University sociologist Kelly Miller commenced with what appeared to be an attack on Bryan and his crusade. The Commoner's success, Miller noted, seems to have come only among "the people who have been least affected by common school and higher education." No state with a well-established school system had yet attempted to forbid teaching evolution. Yet as Miller contemplated the modernists' approach to the Bible, he confessed concern that "any creed becomes less effective as it becomes more liberal." The Unitarians, for example, had set up a new mode of worship that appealed to "the intellectual elite" but in one hundred years had made little headway beyond that "charmed circle." Liberalism could expect still less success among members of his own race, who were "essentially fundamentalists," Miller concluded. That was as it should be. "It would be risky beyond justification for our Negro denomination[s] to venture upon the new and untried experiment," he warned. "It would involve their unsophisticated followers in a maze of doubt and speculation that could only end in a maze of bewilderment and confusion." In the end, Miller was prepared to let the white denominations "try all things," but he seemed to hold African Americans to a lower standard as he urged them to hold fast to the faith of the fathers. (16) The editor of the Norfolk Journal and Guide independently reached similar conclusions but used more positive terms. "We find that Afro-Americans are fundamentalists, for the most pan," wrote the editor approvingly. History had given them good reasons to remain so. "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 of stumble in the Promise." Further, a conservative belief in the Bible preserved the race's special status with God. "The Afro-American people are comprehended in the prophecy, 'I will make me a new people and a new tongue,"' he suggested. (17) African American Christians had a long tradition of belief in God's special providence for the poor and oppressed, and the conventions of African American worship strongly identified the fate of the race with God's plan to liberate the ancient Hebrews from Egyptian bondage. Could black Christians throw away this trust in an immanent God who cares for his people in favor of the modernists' abstract, intellectualized faith? In some instances, the questions of biblical inerrancy and God's special relationship with his people led black ministers rather far from mainstream opinion. On the second day of the Scopes trial, for example, the defense attorney Arthur Garfield Hays, a longtime associate of Clarence Darrow, mocked the Tennessee anti-evolution statute by proposing to outlaw as well the heliocentric theory of the universe, for it contradicted biblical accounts of the sun going around the earth. A white northerner, Hays could be forgiven for having missed the controversy in Richmond, Virginia, two months earlier, when the Reverend James S. Hatcher, pastor of Richmond's Third Street Bethel A.M.E. Church, stood before thousands of congregants and declared his belief that "The Sun Do Move and the Earth Has Corners." (18) In thus asserting his faith in the literal truth of the Bible, Hatcher consciously positioned himself as a spiritual heir to one of the great nineteenth-century black preachers, the Reverend John Jasper of Richmond, Virginia. In 1878, nearly fifty years before Hatcher revived the theme, Jasper had gained national fame through his sermon "The Sun Do Move and the Earth Am Flat." Born in 1812 and a slave for over fifty years, Jasper had begun preaching on his home plantation, and allies and detractors alike felt "he never grew away from the tastes, dialects, and manners of the bondage times." Stalking the pulpit, laughing, singing, and re-enacting the biblical scenes that he knew so well, Jasper laid out a gospel that was, in the words of one observer, "red hot, full of love, full of invective ... full of every passion that ever flamed in the human breast." Although Jasper disdained "eddicatid preachers," students from Richmond's Union Theological Seminary at times arrived an hour early just to get seats for his sermons. In those years before Jim Crow had solidified in the churches, the upper section of Richmond's Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church was often filled with white worshippers and curiosity-seekers. Before he died in 1901, Jasper had used the fame from "The Sun Do Move" and other sermons to build up the church from an abandoned stable to a beautiful edifice that hosted services for nearly three thousand members, including many of Richmond's elite black Baptist families. In the 1920s Jasper's memory was still so revered that many parishioners could not bear even to build a new church building. Although the congregation had outgrown the old structure, many members supposedly feared that Jasper's spirit would "rise out of his grave and wreak vengeance on them" if they ever tore it down. Instead they renovated and expanded the old building, essentially building a new shell around the older structure at a cost of approximately $100,000. (19) Jasper's church still embraced them. In "The Sun Do Move" Jasper took his stand for the Bible. Explaining modestly that he had learned to read late in life, Jasper denied being any kind of a deep scholar. "But I can read the Bible," he said, "and get the things that lay on top of the soil." Jasper chose as his text Joshua 10:13, which describes how the people of Israel had escaped their Egyptian bondage only to be surrounded by enemies in the land of Gibeon. Under Joshua, the Israelites and their allies met their foes on the plain of battle and after a bitter struggle began to win the fight. But as Jasper noted, "the hours got away too [fast] for him," so Joshua commanded the sun to stand still until his army could achieve complete victory for the Lord. | |
What did the sun do? Did he glare down in fiery wrath and say, "What
are you talking about my stopping for, Joshua; I ain't never started
yet. I've been here all the time, and it would smash up everything if
I were to start"? No, he didn't say that. But what does the Bible
say? That's what I ask to know. It says that it was at the voice of
Joshua that it stopped. I didn't say it stopped; ain't for Jasper to
say that, but the Bible, the Book of God, said so. But I say this;
nothing can stop until it has first started. So I know what I'm
talking about. (20)
| | Jasper went on to point out other biblical passages that suggested the sun went around the earth, and he added textual evidence that the earth was flat, with four corners. Jasper knew all of this contradicted the ideas of "great scholars," but he noted that "[t]hey are on the wrong side of the Bible; that's on the outside of the Bible, and there's where the trouble comes in with them.... I ain't caring so much about the sun, though it's mighty convenient to have it, but my trust is in the Word of the Lord." One of Jasper's biographers admits that to many educated listeners the preacher was "an ignorant, old simpleton, a buffoon of the pulpit." But few denied the depth of Jasper's devotion or the power of his sermon, which he delivered more than 250 times in the years before his death. (21) In fact, Jasper's literal belief in the shape of the universe may have been beside the point. Cleophus J. LaRue argues that "The Sun Do Move" must be understood as part of a so-called black hermeneutic, an interpretive framework in which African Americans have envisioned God as all-powerful and willing to use his might "on behalf of the marginalized and powerless of society in an immediate and practical way." (22) Jasper's God stopped the sun not to demonstrate his superiority to natural law but in order to liberate the Jews from Egyptian slavery and their enemies--one of the most resonant biblical themes for African American Christians. The sun and the moon, Jasper explained, "never budged, neither of them, long as the Lord's army needed a light to carry on the battle." LaRue suggests that the power of Jasper's sermon lay in the message that black congregants could count on God's divine aid, even in the darkest days of the late nineteenth century, if they only had faith. God's plan for his people and not his literal Word inspired Jasper's cosmology. "It ain't no business of mine whether the sun moves or stands still, or whether it stops or goes back or rises or sets," Jasper told his listeners. "All I ask is that we will take what the Lord says about it and let His will be done about everything." (23) Out of respect for Jasper's legacy, no other minister for decades dared to touch the old man's subject. In late March 1925, however, just as the fundamentalist movement and the anti-evolution crusade were spreading the controversy over biblical inerrancy throughout the South, James S. Hatcher revived Jasper's famous thesis. Hatcher delivered a variation on "The Sun Do More" to nearly a thousand listeners, black and white, at his own A.M.E. church in Richmond, Virginia; by popular demand he preached the sermon again in April to a mixed-race, overflowing crowd of more than three thousand at Richmond's city auditorium. Like Jasper, Hatcher cited the story of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, and he further noted nearly thirty places in which the Bible tells of the sun "going down" or "rising"--in other words, revolving around the earth. Similarly, Hatcher followed Jasper's "proof" that the earth was a flat quadrilateral, offering as evidence the language of Isaiah 11:12 (the Lord "shall gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth") and Revelations 7:1 ("I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth"). To believe otherwise, Hatcher argued, meant turning away from the great John Jasper, whose success as a preacher ratified his wisdom; it meant ignoring Moses, who was "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" and who nonetheless understood the sun to move around the earth; and it meant turning away from the very idea of an inspired Bible. "Call God a lie if you will," Hatcher concluded, "for it is His word that I give you as to the rising and the going down of the Sun." Commending Hatcher's "masterful manner," the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported that many people left the church "rather skeptical" of their earlier belief that "the Earth is round and revolves around the sun." (24) While some African Americans felt that Jasper's lack of education and the passage of time entitled him to some indulgence, James S. Hatcher received no such lenience from his peers. A graduate of Alabama State Normal School, with stints at Wilberforce University and Payne Theological Seminary, Hatcher had enough education to teach at Kittrell College and to work for a time as Booker T. Washington's secretary at Tuskegee. In newspaper photographs from the time, Hatcher wears academic or clerical robes and a mortarboard. The forty-year-old preacher had plenty of what John Jasper liked to call "booklarnin'." Hatcher combined scholarly eloquence with an old-fashioned focus on saving souls. By running Third Street Bethel A.M.E. as if it were in a perpetual revival he claimed to have produced more than 125 conversions during his first year in Richmond. (25) Hatcher's revival of "The Sun Do Move" touched off a bitter controversy over his motives and the place of biblical literalism in black Christianity. The dispute dominated the front page of the Richmond Planet for the next month and provoked comment in other black newspapers nationwide. In his syndicated column for the Preston News Service (an African American wire service), Ernest Rice McKinney pondered a variety of possible motives for Hatcher's choice to repeat Jasper's "ignorant" sermon. "Our friend Hatcher may have been talking with William Jennings Bryan," McKinney suggested. "He may be under the spell of Macbeth's witches, the head hunters of Borneo or some long distance African medicine man." But McKinney felt the surest motive was mere greed: "The collections were perhaps falling off.... A new 'selling' talk was needed to make receipts balance the tremendous overhead of church--including the pastor's board and keep." Gordon B. Hancock, a pious Baptist professor at Virginia Union University, was still more cutting. He complained that Hatcher had "desecrat[ed]" the memory of John Jasper. "Dr. Hatcher seems to be too far removed from the Jasper time to preach the Jasper sermons," Hancock argued. "Clerical gowns and theological degrees and Jasper sermons do not go together." The dilemma was obvious to Hancock: "If Dr. Hatcher is preaching what he does not believe he is simply commercializing the sacred memory of Jasper; if he believes what he is preaching he forfeits his claims to a respectful hearing from intelligent people." (26) Contrary to insinuations that he preached "The Sun Do Move" for money and notoriety, Hatcher offered a simpler and, in the context of 1925, more believable account of his motives. "I am an out and out Fundamentalist," he proclaimed, "and Richmond knows it." He regarded the sermon as part of a conscious strategy to protect biblical revelation against the encroachments of science and modernism. "[T]hese are days of Apostasy, and I will not stand by like an abject coward and permit 'so-called scholarship' to read all of the miracles out of the Bible without protest," Hatcher wrote. "If God made a mistake by the mouth of the Holy Ghost and His holy prophets in saying that the sun 'rises,' 'sets,' 'goes down,' 'goes back,' etc. it is possible that He made a mistake in saying that 'he that believeth shall be saved.'" "Dispute the motion of the sun," Hatcher argued as the controversy grew more bitter, and you would soon "dispute the virgin birth of Jesus." "[W]hither will this infidelity lead?" he asked. "If Jesus was not conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary, then God is a liar, Mary an harlot, Joseph a fornicator, and Jesus a bastard: and listen keenly, no bastard saviour, with a lying father and an harlot mother can save me." Rather than accept such a possibility, Hatcher asserted his belief that every word of the Bible was "the eternal, inerrant, infallible Word of God." (27) Perhaps the critical factor in John Jasper's original sermon was his portrait of an all-powerful God willing to help the oppressed in concrete, practical ways, but by 1925 the context for the sermon had clearly changed. Hatcher may have partaken of Jasper's black hermeneutic, but Hatcher's rendition of "The Sun Do Move" in 1925 suggested an equally close affiliation with the national fundamentalist crusade. Indeed, where Jasper used biblical accounts of the sun primarily as a launching point to assert faith in God's power and goodness, Hatcher showed more interest in heaping up evidence from the Bible in a legalistic manner. If he went further than Bryan in asserting his belief in a flat earth and a moving sun, Hatcher was nevertheless in accord with fundamentalist leaders' beliefs that the Bible was inerrant, evolutionists and theological liberals were responsible for the Great War, and the pulpit needed to be purified of the modernist--"the preacher who lives by the Gospel and denies the Holy Word." Hatcher's repeated caution that he could make no definite commitments because he was "expecting a call to meet Our Lord Jesus in the air at any moment" also identified him as a premillennialist, the most common dispensational stance for fundamentalists. (28) Hatcher's self-identification as a fundamentalist did little to quiet his detractors. The Baltimore Afro-American could find only one black citizen who agreed with Hatcher, and the paper concluded that the minister would meet only ridicule if he ventured to deliver his fundamentalist sermon outside his home city. Back in Richmond, Gordon Hancock showed even less restraint. "As a claimant to scholarly distinction," the professor opined, "[Hatcher] is a stupendous impossibility and a bristling failure; as a theologian, he is a persistent and a vague excuse." Beside the great John Jasper, the Reverend Hatcher "shrinks like a punctured gas bag." (29) The sharpness of the attacks on Hatcher suggests that opposition to his sermons was based on more than just theological conflict. With acute double consciousness, Hancock felt compelled to evaluate the controversy with one eye on the event itself and the other on its implications for his race's reputation. He admitted that "it is humiliating to Richmond in particular and the Negro race in general to have a Negro boasting of learning and college degrees and ministering to a great congregation in a great city openly and with calculation aforethought advocating the sensational doctrine of 'a four-cornered earth and a moving sun.'" (30) Only this sense of embarrassment--a fear that white society might lump together black leaders and laypeople as backward--can account for the level of vitriol in McKinney and Hancock's criticisms. The popularity of Hatcher's literalist approach to the Bible made it inevitable that various groups would ask him to preach on the topic of evolution. In the wake of the Scopes trial, he responded with sermons titled "Folly and Menace of Evolution," "Can a Christian be an Evolutionist?" and "The Meaning and Menace of Evolution." Something of their flavor is preserved in newspaper reports on "The Meaning and Menace of Evolution." Like Bryan and other white fundamentalists, Hatcher focused first on scientific disagreements about the mechanism of evolution, scoffing that scientists had modified their explanation of evolution so often "that it has become like the famous Heinz pickles, there are at least '57 varieties,' and each variety is destructive to the word of God." In contrast to this uncertainty, Genesis says nine times that God created every creature "after its kind" and in other instances that God created man in his own image. Nor was Genesis the only victim of the evolutionary hypothesis. Hatcher cautioned that it "is destructive to the deity of Christ, because it does away with the virgin birth of Christ." "Imagine Jesus coming up through a serpent," the minister exclaimed. "Jesus does not trace his geneology from protoplasmic cells or from monkeys but from God." (31) Finally, Hatcher invoked a mixture of theology and racial history to attack the idea of human evolution. As with most white fundamentalist leaders in the South, Hatcher's premillennial dispensationalism led him to believe that earthly life would remain basically unsalvageable until the Second Coming of Christ ushers in a millennium of peace. "Man goes steadily down, instead of evolving into a greater being, each day growing farther from God," Hatcher explained. "The great Greeks and Romans of ancient times, have not developed into higher or greater men, but they can be found cleaning hats and shining shoes and the like." Humanity was not ascending or evolving toward greater perfection--quite the opposite. Salvation therefore lay not in evolution "but in revelation, regeneration, the new birth." Only the Bible, literally understood, could point the way. Whether he was discussing the position of the sun, the flatness of the earth, or the origin of humanity, Hatcher's theology seemed much closer to the bibliolatry of the white fundamentalists than to a black hermeneutic. (32) The reactions against Hatcher's revival of "The Sun Do Move" suggest that fundamentalism met opposition even within African American churches. Hancock, for example, was a religious leader as well as a faculty member at Virginia Union, and he held nothing back in his attack on Hatcher's overly literal approach to the Bible. Although modernists were generally less visible than the avowed fundamentalists in African American churches, those with liberal views nevertheless held a handful of prominent pulpits, especially outside the South, and they made themselves heard in the debates touched off by the Scopes trial. For many of these theological liberals, the fight over evolution was only one battle in the broader crusade to modernize the pulpit and improve the respectability of the race. Theological liberals most commonly called for African Americans to steer a course of theistic evolution between the extremes of fundamentalism and mere materialism. "Evolution does not contradict the basic truth of the Bible," explained Shelton Hale Bishop, curate of St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem. Educated at Columbia University and the Episcopalian General Theological Seminary, Bishop claimed that the Bible contained "great religious truths," but he denied that the "glorious folklore" of the Bible could contradict science. "[B]oth contain immortal and everlasting truths," he concluded, "and earnest men always endeavor to find these truths that are deeply hidden in the heart of God." Charles H. Wesley, an A.M.E. minister, told the Preachers' Meetings of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore that "[t]o me, creation is just as divine and miraculous, if it were slow and gradual over long periods of time, as it would be if it were sudden and complete." Less enthusiastically, Dr. John H. Frank, a regular contributor to the Louisville Leader, allowed that theistic evolution--"God's way or process of development"--was perhaps acceptable. But he flatly rejected a more naturalistic evolution: "I refuse to allow the certitude of my simple faith in God to be removed by the vagaries of the huge guess named evolution." (33) More responses against fundamentalists were called forth by Rev. Charles Satchell Morris's well-publicized attacks on Darwinism before, during, and after the Scopes trial. Although George Schuyler labeled him "a notorious Negro rabble rouser and pulpit clown," Morris had attended Wilberforce University and Newton Theological Institution, served as minister of New York's respectable Abyssinian Baptist Church from 1902 to 1908 (preceding the well-known black leader Adam Clayton Powell in that post), and traveled for a time as a missionary in South Africa. Now the Kentucky native lectured to thousands in Norfolk, Virginia, and elsewhere about the fallacies of evolution and published his scientific and theological case in a seemingly interminable eleven-part series "Up From a Monkey or Down From God" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, portions of which were reprinted in other black newspapers. Morris contrasted the hypotheses and speculative conclusions drawn by evolutionists with the Bible's clear explanation of the origin and perpetuation of species. In response, the Pittsburgh Courier published "Is Evolution Based Upon a Guess? A School Girl's Answer to Dr. Charles Satchell Morris," by Alma Booker. Booker contradicted Morris's scholarly assertions by presenting the scientific case for human evolution, including evidence from embryology, paleontology, and anatomy. Further, as a pious Christian she attacked fundamentalists' insistence "that God created man at one stroke" before she turned to Morris's own lack of faith. "If Dr. Morris does not believe that all present life could have originated in one single simple cell," she argued, then "he is underrating the power of God, who made that cell. If God chose to write the story of creation on the fact [sic] of the whole earth instead of on the printed page, why should we disbelieve it?" As the Baptist Topeka Plaindealer asserted, "True Science is the greatest handmai[d] of true religion." (34) Contrary to Morris's charge, at least some African Americans held that faith and evolution were compatible. Despite these whispers of support for modernism, many African Americans--probably a majority--accepted as literal truth the words of the Bible and possibly even considered themselves fundamentalists. African Americans adhered to a solidly conservative theology, and ministerial leaders ranged themselves in opposition to the same cultural changes that engaged their white counterparts, including not only the spread of Darwinism but also the Jazz-Age sins of drinking, dancing, and petting. In the end, though, conservative African Americans never launched themselves into a broader crusade to purify the churches and society. Any tendencies toward accompanying white southerners on a journey toward militant fundamentalism faded due to the black church's paradoxical status as the central power within the African American community yet a virtually powerless actor within the white South. Most African American Christians fitted well into the theological definition of fundamentalism. First, like their fellow white Protestants in the South, African Americans generally expressed a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible as written, and they strenuously opposed evolution because it contradicted the divine account of the creation as given in Genesis. Second, African Americans tended to believe that a literal heaven and hell were the boundaries of a universe in which God acted in concrete, miraculous ways to aid the oppressed. Third, black Christians retained a strong tradition of revivalism--even to the extent of producing at least two itinerants who claimed to be the "black Billy Sunday." Finally, the premillennial dispensationalism that Ernest R. Sandeen and others have seen as integral to the white fundamentalist worldview was present in the black churches, too--it was the common stance for black and white Christians alike in the pessimistic atmosphere of the post-Civil War South. White premillennialists might expect to meet Jesus in the air at any moment, but they would have to be ready to share him with the Reverend James S. Hatcher and his brethren. (35) Although these were old doctrines, African American belief in them may actually have been growing stronger rather than weaker at the time of the Scopes trial. Paradoxically, African Americans were receiving just enough education to intensify their adherence to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. One scholar argues that a more conservative and literalist understanding of the Bible among African Americans arrived only in the early twentieth century as rising rates of education and literacy in the black community carried congregants further away from black Christianity's oral tradition. With a literacy rate approaching 75 percent, African American congregants by the 1920s had sufficient education to revere the biblical text as verbally inspired; a basic level of literacy made possible plain reading and amateur exegesis that reinforced a common reliance on the Bible. At the same time, the rising tide of education lifted few ministers of the race all the way up to the elite colleges and seminaries where they would have come into contact with higher criticism, evolutionary science, and the other products of recent European scholarship. Laments over the poor educational background of black ministers were common in the early twentieth century. As of the mid-1920s, barely 38 percent of urban black ministers and 17 percent of their rural counterparts were either college or seminary graduates (compared to 80 percent and 47 percent, respectively, among white ministers). The tradition in the African American church that a minister needed "little or no academic preparation" if he had been "called" by God was partly ideological, partly a practical response to a historical situation in which most African Americans were barred from higher education. (36) Either way, African American ministers did not stray far from their parishioners' conservative biblical approach. By creed and by self-definition, many African Americans agreed with fundamentalist theology as of 1925. Some of the factors that might have transformed theological conservatism into militant fundamentalism were also present in the 1920s. In particular, the preoccupation with respectability that Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has identified in her study of black Baptists occasionally boiled over into a scathing critique of public vice and the degradation of the younger generation. For example, at the international Christian Endeavor convention taking place at the same time as the Scopes trial, a great many black speakers took the floor to denounce dancing, with one "race delegate" particularly condemning the "pagan" African heritage of many contemporary dances. Virginia Baptist minister Dr. B. W. Dance later that fall followed his sermon on the errors of evolution with a hostile homily on the theme "bobbed hair and short skirts." (37) Conservative African Americans were as estranged from the culture of the Jazz Age as they were from modernism and evolutionary science. There is also no logical reason why militant fundamentalism could not have coexisted with the African American church's complex social mission or with its role as a haven in a racist society. Although few white fundamentalists participated in political liberalism to the extent that William Jennings Bryan did, many of them, such as John Roach Straton and William Bell Riley, had indeed been active in social uplift and charity work. Similarly, the Salvation Army successfully combined aggressive Protestantism with social activism. Militant fundamentalism could have been consistent with the African American church's theological conceptions and its social aims. (38) Yet African Americans did not become militant fundamentalists dedicated to purifying church and society. The WCFA, the Bryan League, the Bible Crusaders--all of the major fundamentalist organizations--remained lily-white during the 1920s. Nor did African Americans found their own fundamentalist associations until decades later. The black secession from the National Association of Evangelicals in 1963 to form the National Negro Evangelical Association was the first clear example of an interdenominational fundamentalist movement within the African American community. (39) In the 1920s and for several decades thereafter a massing of internal and external obstacles halted or diverted the development of a more aggressive fundamentalism in the African American churches. Denominational allegiances and machinery played a role in defusing militancy. For example, few African Americans were Presbyterians, thus blacks sidestepped some of the most bitter fighting between modernists and fundamentalists. The controversies between modernists and fundamentalists struck the northern Presbyterians the hardest, because Presbyterianism there retained a Calvinist concern for right doctrine that was put to the test by increasing numbers of ministers educated in the higher criticism. The denomination's centralized structure also provided opportunities for organized efforts to discipline dissidents. Some of Bryan's major efforts on behalf of fundamentalism, for example, took place in the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1923, where the Great Commoner and his allies attempted to purge the church and its seminaries of biblical liberals. (40) The vast majority of African Americans, however, belonged either to one of the various African Methodist Episcopal denominations or to a Baptist church that was nominally associated with the National Baptist Convention. Approximately six of every ten black church members in the 1920s were Baptists. Neither affiliation encouraged militant action. African American Methodists, like their white counterparts, had a tradition of being more concerned with experiential Christianity and righteous behavior than with doctrine, and the rise of Holiness variants only intensified this reliance on religious experience. (41) Black Baptist churches, again like their white counterparts, housed some of the most theologically conservative Protestants in America, but black and white Baptists alike lacked a centralized denominational structure. Cleansing such a notoriously decentralized system would have meant purging thousands of churches one by one. Black denominations at any rate had little need to expurgate modernists. Only a small number of elite ministers received training at the northern seminaries and colleges that would have introduced them to modernism. The large majority of African American ministers received no higher education at all, and the rest took their degrees or certificates from southern institutions that were generally free of heretical pedagogy. Modernism thus had made few inroads among the African American clergy of the South, and no significant modernist threat existed in the black churches to galvanize conservative ministers into a fundamentalist reaction. Even if modernism had loomed larger as a threat in the churches, conservative African American ministers may have lacked the stomach for a purge, for they were still doing quite well within the black community. White fundamentalist leaders drew their bitterness at least partly from a sense of lost influence--a feeling that America was turning its back on the revivalist Protestantism that had once shaped its public and private culture--but African American clergymen were still dominant figures in their communities. Despite the growing competition of secular entertainments as African Americans migrated to northern cities and despite the rise of a black bourgeoisie made up of teachers, doctors, businesspeople, and lawyers, African Americans remained the most highly churched group in America, the black church continued to be the central institution of any African American community, and the African American minister generally retained his elevated social status. Internal pressures for militancy were weak. Further, the African American concern with presenting a respectable public face likely stunted the growth of militant fundamentalism in the wake of the Scopes trial. White fundamentalist leaders such as T. T. Martin reveled in their position as outsiders and reserved their strongest vituperation for "respectable" scientists and theologians. Although these fundamentalists were well aware of the ridicule they received from cosmopolitan elites, they never needed to worry that they were damaging their race's reputation by their activism. In contrast, African American ministers often had key roles in the collective effort to improve the race's status and image--they wanted to eradicate their outsider status, not glorify it. Thus, when Hatcher revived "The Sun Do Move," he could be seen as playing into white stereotypes of African Americans as ignorant and unlettered. The acute embarrassment that the minister's performance caused African Americans like Gordon Hancock and George Schuyler had its roots in their desire to fight white prejudice. African American ministers who were aware of the mockery that rained down on Tennessee during the Scopes trial could be forgiven if they chose not to add such calumnies to those that were already falling upon the race. Finally, outside the denominations, the triggers for militant action were also missing. In particular, the question of teaching evolution in the public schools did not become a pressing matter for the African American community, especially in the South. This factor was critical because Darwinism in the schools was the central issue that inspired thousands of ordinary white Protestants to attach themselves to the fundamentalist crusade. As secondary-school attendance in the United States increased almost tenfold in the three decades preceding the 1920s, thousands of impressionable youth were for the first time brought into contact with evolutionary science, alarming many parents and religious conservatives. Immediately following the Great War, Bryan and his allies claimed that this education had already induced massive waves of defections from revealed religion. Thus the antievolution movement found a receptive audience among concerned parents and anxious legislators around 1922 when it made the teaching of evolution in the schools its central theme and introduced a concrete solution to the problem in the form of curriculum laws. (42) African American parents, however, were not really a part of this audience. Their children faced no danger. Although school attendance for African American youth was likewise on the rise, only a quarter to a third of African American seventeen-year-olds, for example, attended school of any kind. During the advanced grades of high school, students were likeliest to encounter evolution, but disproportionately few black students reached that level. The curriculum in their typically segregated high schools seldom included such an advanced biological concept as evolution. Rather, the segregated schools tended to focus more on agriculture and trades to the exclusion of "impractical" theoretical subjects. Any advance in the high school curriculum had long been thwarted by dismal facilities, untrained faculty, and radically unequal funding--an average in the South of about four times more money spent to educate each white youth than each black one. (43) The state of African American education in the 1920s presented numerous reasons for anger, but evolution was not one of them. The major external factor that touched off militant action by white fundamentalists was missing for African Americans. As the doleful state of segregated educational facilities suggests, even if external events had triggered militant fundamentalism among African Americans, the race lacked access to the levers of power, especially in the southern states where the great majority still resided. By the 1920s, the movement for disfranchisement had largely completed its work. In a majority-black state such as Mississippi, for example, a mere handful of African Americans managed to cast ballots during the decade. Some segregated public school systems employed a black school board to supervise the colored schools, but the members' authority was always tentative, always at the whites' sufferance. African Americans often found themselves directed by white patrons or at the very least fighting for a greater portion of shared governance even in the black colleges and seminaries (including at the many institutions founded by the northern American Baptist Home Mission Society). Further, Jim Crow restrictions barred African Americans from attending the Bible schools that played a critical role in developing the fundamentalist network. Eventually, a few southern white fundamentalists realized that their racial caste system was preventing them from reaching out to a natural fundamentalist constituency, and in the late 1920s they slowly began to organize Bible schools for African American students. This belated philanthropy, too, underlined the relative powerlessness of conservative African American Christians. (44) With so few public venues available for the institutional expression of militant black fundamentalism, and with several significant factors weighing against public militancy, conservative black theology remained largely confined to the churches and did not venture into the public sphere as white fundamentalism did. (45) African Americans' residence in the South theologically predisposed them to fundamentalism, but wider social conditions in the region largely prevented them from expressing their militancy politically. (1) Samuel S. Hill, "Fundamentalism and the South," Perspectives in Religious Studies, 13 (Winter 1986), 47-65. On the intertwined histories of African American and white Christianity in the South see Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill, 1997); John B. Boles, ed., Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1741-1870 (Lexington, Ky., 1988); and Boles, The Irony of Southern Religion (New York, 1994). On blacks' impulse to create religious institutions independent of white control see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), 289-321; and Katharine L. Dvorak, An African-American Exodus: The Segregation of the Southern Churches (Brooklyn, 1991). Sources consulted for this article include the African American newspapers and periodicals cited in the notes, as well as the Atlanta Independent, Chicago Broad Ax, Chicago Defender, and Cleveland (Ohio) Gazette. Unfortunately, there are no extant black newspapers from Tennessee for this period. I was unable to secure additional African American newspapers and periodicals from Mobile, Montgomery, and Tuskegee, Alabama; Augusta, Georgia; Arkansas; Mississippi; North Carolina; and South Carolina. I have cited in the notes the small number of black religious periodicals available. The Scopes trial took place after the school year had finished, so black college newspapers largely missed their opportunity to comment. (2) On the view that fundamentalism was a rearguard action by dispossessed rural Americans uncomfortable with science see Stewart G. Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (New York, 1931), 259-317: and Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York, 1931), 197-206. This interpretation was picked up and popularized by William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (Chicago, 1958), among others, For a similar but more nuanced approach see Willard B. Gatewood Jr., Preachers. Pedagogues, and Politicians: The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina, 1920-1927 (Chapel Hill, 1966). More recent interpretations of fundamentalism include Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago, 1970); George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York and Oxford, 1980); and Virginia Lieson Brereton, Training God's Army: The American Bible School, 1880-1940 (Bloomington, 1990), although all three slight the South. For examinations of American fundamentalism in broader historical and transatlantic contexts see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989); Marsden, "Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon, A Comparison with English Evangelicalism," Church History, 46 (June 1977), 215-32 (esp. pp. 225-28); and Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (New York, 1992), 141-42. (3) Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 117-18; Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism; Paul K. Conkin, When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals (Lanham, Md., 1998), 64-65. On modernism see Shailer Mathews, The Faith of Modernism (New York, 1924); William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); and Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930 (University, Ala., 1982). On secularization as a goal of modernism see Richard Wightman Fox, "Experience and Explanation in Twentieth-Century American Religious History," in Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (New York and Oxford, 1997), 394-413. On the decline of Protestant hegemony among intellectuals see R. Laurence Moore, "Secularization: Religion and the Social Sciences," in William R. Hutchison, ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960 (New York, 1989), 233-52. (4) Marsden, "Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon," 225-28; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 141-53. (5) Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 11; Marsden, "Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon," 225-28. For an instructive contrast between American and English evangelicalism see Numbers, Creationists, 140-43. (6) Virginia Brereton offers a useful caveat that most ordinary fundamentalists were probably more concerned with irreligion in their own communities than with Darwinism, but evolution was unquestionably the force driving fundamentalist leaders into an open crusade. See Brereton, Training God's Army 30-31. For a local example of white evangelicals sidestepping the fundamentalist/modernist controversy see Samuel C. Shepherd, Avenues of Faith: Shaping the Urban Religious Faith of Richmond, Virginia, 1900-1929 (Tuscaloosa, 2001), chap. 11. (7) Kenneth K. Bailey, "Southern White Protestantism at the Turn of the Century," American Historical Review, 68 (April 1963), 618, 622 (quotation). (8) See the depictions of the movement's early leaders in LeRoy Ashby, William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston, 1987), esp. pp. 175-203; Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan. Vol. In: Political Puritan (Lincoln, Neb., 1969); Barry Hankins, God's Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington, Ky., 1996); and William Vance Trollinger Jr., God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison, Wis., 1990). The inimitable T. T. Martin apparently lacks scholarly treatment. An excellent recent work on the Scopes trial is Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York, 1997). An edited trial transcript and related documents from the controversy can be found in Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (New York, 2002). (9) Houston Informer, August 1, 1925, p. 4 (first quotation); Kansas City (Kans.) Call, July 17, 1925, p. B1 (second and third quotations). National Baptist Convention report in Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 19, 1925, p. 8. See also reports of anti-evolutionist sermons in Savannah Tribune, July 16, 1925, p. 1, August 6, 1925, p. 12. (10) Baltimore Afro-American, September 5, 1925, p. 10. (11) Norfolk Journal and Guide, August 1, 1925, p. 1. See also the sympathetic obituary "William Jennings Bryan," A.M.E. Church Review, 42 (October 1925), 331-32; and columnist Floyd J. Calvin's reflections in Pittsburgh Courier, August 8, 1925, p. 16. (12) Birmingham Reporter, August 8, 1925, p. 1 (Holley); Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 2, 1925, p. 4 (Graham). See also Birmingham Reporter, July 25, 1925, p. 1. (13) Baltimore Afro-American, July 4, 1925, p. 17. (14) John W. Norris, "Evolution Not a Fact--The Bible a Fact," A.M.E. Church Review, 42 (October 1925), 323-25. See also Charles H. Wesley, "Does the First Chapter of Genesis Teach Evolution?" ibid., 40 (October 1923), 75-77; E. E. Moody, "What is Meant by Fundamentalism and Modernism as it Relates to Church Doctrine?" ibid., 42 (October 1925), 298-99; "A Reply to Our Critics," ibid., 42 (January 1926), 409-10; and J. W. Sanders, "Evolution--Its Weak Spots," ibid., 42 (April 1926), 440-45. (15) Houston Informer, July 25, 1925, p. 5 (quotations); Benjamin Elijah Mays and Joseph William Nicholson, The Negro's Church (New York, 1933), 17, 58-93. (16) Baltimore Afro-American, June 20, 1925, p. 11. (17) Norfolk Journal and Guide, June 13, 1925, p. 12. (18) Moran, Scopes Trial, 81-82; Richmond Planet. March 28, 1925, p. 1 (quotation). (19) William E. Hatcher, John Jasper: The Unmatched Negro Philosopher and Preacher (New York, 1908), 7 (first quotation), 9 (second quotation), 122 (third quotation); Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 12, 1925, p. 1; Baltimore Afro-American, May 9, 1925, p. 17, April 25, 1925, p. 19, July 11, 1925, p. 14, March 21, 1925, p. 2 (last quotation), April 4, 1925, p. 13. (20) John Jasper, "The Sun Do Move," in Cleophus J. LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching (Louisville, 2000), 131-32. Although the sermon is generally rendered in dialect, I have followed LaRue's rendition in standard English, both because of greater intelligibility and because Jasper's followers, such as Richmond's Rev. D. G. Mack, claimed Jasper always used "good English," as noted in Baltimore Afro-American, April 25, 1925, p. 19. (21) Jasper, "Sun Do Move," 134 (first and second quotations); LaRue, Heart of Black Preaching, 31 (third quotation); Hatcher, John Jasper, 128 (also contains third quotation); Baltimore Afro-American, May 9, 1925, p. 17. (22) LaRue, Heart of Black Preaching, 31-36 (quotation on p. 36). For a discussion of black preaching as Bible-centered but "not slavish or literal" see Henry H. Mitchell, Black Preaching (Philadelphia, 1970), 112-14 (quotation on p. 113). (23) Jasper, "Sun Do Move," 132 (first quotation), 134 (second and third quotation). (24) Richmond Planet, March 28, 1925, p. 1; Baltimore Afro-American, April 4, 1925, p. 13 (quotations from sermon); Norfolk Journal and Guide, March 28, 1925, p. 11 (final three quotations). (25) Baltimore Afro-American, April 4, 1925, p. 1; Richmond Planet, April 11, 1925, p. 1. (26) Richmond Planet, April 11, 1925, pp. 1, 8. (27) Richmond Planet, April 11, 1925, p. 1 (first and second quotations), p. 4 (third, fourth, and last quotations), April 18, 1925, p. 8 (other quotations). (28) Richmond Planet, May 2, 1925. p. 5 (first quotation), April 11, 1925, p. 4 (second quotation); Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 149-53. (29) Baltimore Afro-American, April 18, 1925. p. 20; Richmond Planet, April 25, 1925, p. 1 (third quotation), p. 8 (first and second quotations). (30) Richmond Planet, April 25, 1925, p. 8. (31) Richmond Planet, August 1, 1925, p. 1 (first quotation), August 29, 1925, p. 8 (second quotation); Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 26, 1925, p. 11 (other quotations). (32) Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 26, 1925, p. 11. (33) New York Amsterdam News, August 5, 1925, p. 1; Wesley, "Does the First Chapter of Genesis Teach Evolution?" 75; Louisville Leader, August 1, 1925, p. 8. (34) Charles Satchell Morris, "Up From a Monkey or Down From God," was originally printed in Norfolk Journal and Guide, June 27, 1925, p. 12; July 4, 1925, p. 12; July 11, 1925, p. 12; July 25, 1925, p. 12; August 1, 1925, p. 12; August 8, 1925, p. 12; August 15, 1925, p. 12; August 29, 1925, p. 12; September 5, 1925, p. 12; September 12, 1925, p. 12; and October 3, 1925, p. 12. Descriptions of Morris's public lecture are in Norfolk Journal and Guide, June 13. 1925. p. 6, June 20, 1925, p. 1. George Schuyler, "Thrusts and Lunges," Pittsburgh Courier, July 18, 1925, p. 16; Alma Booker, "Is Evolution Based Upon a Guess? A School Girl's Answer to Dr. Charles Satchell Morris," Pittsburgh Courier, August 8, 1925, p. 5; Topeka Plaindealer, July 24, 1925, p. 3. See also reports of Rev. Richard H. Bowling's addresses in Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 5, 1925, p. 6; September 12, 1925, p. 6; September 26, 1925, p. 6. (35) The "black Billy Sunday" label was claimed by J. Gordon McPherson, a Baptist minister with Holiness leanings, and the Reverend Calvin P. Dixon, denomination unknown. Some of McPherson's sermonizing is preserved on Biograph Record's "This Old World's In a Hell of a Fix," Biograph recording BLP-12027. See notice of Dixon in Norfolk Journal and Guide, August 8, 1925, p, 3, September 19, 1925, p. 1. Black millenarianism was not simply a matter of pre- or post-millennialism, as noted in Timothy E. Fulop, "'The Future Golden Day of the Race': Millennialism and Black Americans in the Nadir, 1877-1901," Harvard Theological Review, 84 (January 1991), 75-99, Seventy years after the Scopes trial, African Americans continued to profess belief in the creationist account of the earth's origins at a rate significantly higher than the national average. In the late 1990s, 59 percent of African Americans adhered to a "creationist" position, as opposed to 46 percent of whites. See George Bishop, "The Religious Worldview and American Beliefs About Human Origins," Public Perspective, 9 (August-September 1998), 42. (36) Albert G. Miller, "The Construction of a Black Fundamentalist Worldview: The Role of Bible Schools," in Vincent L. Wimbush, with the assistance of Rosamond C. Rodman, eds., African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York, 2000). 717; figures from 1926 Government Census of Religious Bodies, reported in Mays and Nicholson, Negro's Church, 40-41 (quotations on p. 40); W. A. Daniel, The Education of Negro Ministers (New York, 1925), 101-3. (37) Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 187-209; Pittsburgh Courier, July 11, 1925, p. 14 (first two quotations); Norfolk Journal and Guide, October 10, 1925. p. 12 (third quotation). (38) Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 128, 161-63; Diane H. Winston, Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). (39) Jim Jones, "Still Playing Catch-up," Christianity Today, 41 (May 19, 1997), 56. (40) Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 172-75. (41) On the "black Protestant establishment" see David W. Wills, "An Enduring Distance: Black Americans and the Establishment," in Hutchison, ed., Between the Times, 168-92. Percentage and information on the continued vitality of black Baptism during the "era of sects and cults" is in Randall K. Burkett, "The Baptist Church in the Years of Crisis: J. C. Austin and Pilgrim Baptist Church, 1926-1950," in Paul E. Johnson, ed., African-American Christianity: Essays in History (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 134-58. Reliance on experiential Christianity is noted in Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 111-19; and Gatewood, Preachers, Pedagogues, and Politicians, 76-79. (42) Edward J. Larson. "Before the Crusade: Evolution in American Secondary Education Before 1920," Journal of the History of Biology, 20 (Spring 1987), 112-13. On other controversies touched off by this proliferation of public schools see Jeffrey P. Moran. "'Modernism Gone Mad': Sex Education Comes to Chicago, 1913," Journal of American History, 83 (September 1996), 481-513; Jonathan Zimmerman. '"Each "Race" Could Have Its Heroes Sung': Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s,'" Journal of American History, 87 (June 2000), 92-111; and American Civil Liberties Union, Committee on Academic Freedom, The Gag on Teaching: The Story of the New Restrictions by Law on Teaching in Schools, and by Public Opinion and Donors on Colleges (New York. 1931). (43) Attendance calculations derived from Frank Alexander Ross, School Attendance in 1920: An Analysis of School Attendance in the United States and in the Several States, With a Discussion of the Factors Involved (Washington, D.C., 1924), 11. Biology does not show up as a separate subject in the curricula for county training schools for black students in the South, and "General Science," which mayor may not have included the subject, was not a common offering (particularly beyond ninth grade), as reported in Jessie Carney Smith and Carrell Peterson Horton, eds., Historical Statistics of Black America (2 vols.; New York, 1995), I, 505. On disparities in funding see Thomas Jesse Jones, "Trends in Negro Education (1915-1930)," in James Hardy Dillard et al., Twenty Year Report of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, 1911-1931 ... (New York, 1932), 34-39. (44) On the critical role that Bible schools played in the development of white fundamentalism see Brereton, Training God's Army. The Dallas Colored Bible Institute began in 1928, followed by the Manhattan Bible Institute in 1938, Carver Bible Institute in 1943, and Cedine Bible Camp and Institute in 1946, as noted in Miller, "Construction of a Black Fundamentalist Worldview," 718-19. (45) On the tension between theological conservatism and social activism in Martin Luther King Jr.'s background see Clayborne Carson, "Martin Luther King Jr., and the African-American Social Gospel," in Johnson, ed., African-American Christianity, 159-77. MR. MORAN is an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. |
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