Max Yergan

by David Henry Anthony III

  Five years earlier Max Yergan had walked into the Shaw University YMCA and inquired about what they were doing. Before long this sophomore was fully engaged in the group’s work. By the time he graduated in 1914 he was prepared to devote a substantial portion of his life to it. In a progression that led to workshops and a succession of local conferences and retreats, he quickly rose to prominence in the organization, becoming one of its national figures by the time the Storer ceremony was held. In an age in which foreign mission service held special appeal for an equally special type of person, Yergan made ready to share the gospel with the sons of Mother India. In the back of his mind was another voice, that of his late maternal grandfather Frederick, who left him the year after he started with the YMCA but whose words yet echoed in his consciousness exhorting him to become a missionary to what he had called “our people” in Africa. When the time came, therefore, he would try his best to find a way to realize grandfather Frederick’s dream. This is the story of how that dream came about, what it led to, and why it matters to the modern world. Telling this tale also requires relating several other sagas, some of which, like his, are told here for the first time.

  In 1916 very few African-Americans had been to India, though there were Indians who had been to America and were curious about and in some cases captivated by the American Negro. The stimuli for this concern were primarily color and caste, features sharpened by colonialism but recognizable as mechanisms of differentiation that facilitated the control of the powerful over the powerless. In deciding to enter India at this time, Yergan took a step into a world that even now is not clear for those who want to know what and whom he found at that time. Although known to write obsessively, typically every day, he left little that is accessible about this experience.

  Apart from a few choice anecdotes that survived thanks to other hands, we know nothing about how his Indian sojourn struck him, and yet it had to have affected him deeply, for from there he did in fact get to serve Africa. These encounters and their impact upon this diasporic traveler reveal a hidden part of the history of people of African descent: the fact that some of them have stubbornly insisted upon getting back to Africa and making it a vital part of their lives in America.

  Many who have looked into this phenomenon have focused on the Pan-African movement, and at an earlier stage this writer considered this movement a key to unraveling some of the mysteries of Max Yergan’s life. However, Yergan would probably not have felt comfortable with the term, even though once bitten by the African bug he was never able to get it out of his system. Some people might analogize this to the literal bite of a bug that leaves one with a permanent living organism, a parasite that those who have spent time in Africa know only too well as a reality and not as a metaphor for what such a trip to the tropics can bring in its train. But however real these opportunistic organisms may be, they do have metaphoric parallels in the diaspora. Indeed, there was and is for many orphaned Africans exiled in the New World something biting them, tearing at their innards, leaving them febrile or insomniac or nauseous, as they wonder who they were before they were given their slave names and what villages their forebears emanated from.

  So it was not so strange that Yergan sought to put things right as best he could under the harrowing circumstances, or at least to do some investigating so that his grandfather’s soul might rest in peace.

  In the course of devoting himself to this endeavor he founded scores of branch YMCAs, got to know the Imperial British East African Protectorate (Kenya), historic Tanganyika (Tanzania), South Africa, historic Basutoland (Lesotho), and Bechuanaland (Botswana), co-led an organization called the International Committee (later Council) on African Affairs, introduced a lively course on Negro History and Culture at New York’s City College, became associate and then assistant to the national secretary, then second president of the National Negro Congress, an internationally known leader in ecumenical concerns, and a conspicuous member of an eccentric coterie of repentant ex-radicals. Each one of these public roles produced its own voluminous body of documents—scores, hundreds, and in some cases thousands of documents, including a critical mass of intelligence files from federal agencies over a period of more than two decades of close surveillance.

  Facing this quantity of documentation has been a demanding and at times depressing chore. More challenging perhaps was the recognition that as public as Yergan was, he and his heirs have fiercely sought to protect their privacy, a difficult thing to accomplish when so much paper is strewn about in the public domain, especially when a protagonist is as adept at writing and publishing as Yergan was. Thus when the project started it seemed a simple matter to work out of the YMCA Bowne Historical Library, then housed in New York City in the shadow of a then still relatively new World Trade Center. This writer became such a regular fixture there in the summer of 1974 as he prepared a master’s thesis on the subject that the staff simply gave him the key on Friday and let him have the run of the place over the weekend, asking only that he return it on Monday morning.

  But then it became clear that there was other material in other archives from different eras in this person’s post-YMCA life. Indeed, he seemed to live more than one life. By the 1930s, for example, he said and did things that seemed wholly out of character from those for which he became known in the teens and twenties, in this country, India, and Eastern and Southern Africa. It was as if, having moved on to something new, he was able to leave almost everything preceding it behind, as if putting on a new pair of clothes and discarding the old. This was how it must have seemed to some of his fellows, as if there were a disconnect between the now and the then—not once and not twice but thrice in his life. It happened again in the forties and fifties and sixties when even as a rapidly aging man in increasingly frail health he wrote and lectured and gave interviews and traveled like someone one-third his age, standing against the mainstream of society as he now looked backward to build what he thought should be a better, freer world. But the price of these changes proved exceedingly high.

  He left behind friends, accumulated enemies, and ended his life in relative isolation. Anyone who looked closely at his trajectory would not wonder why it has not been retraced. He did his best to cover his tracks and in some respects for good reason. This version of that narrative has left out many of the details, concentrating primarily on what seems essential to help delineate the contours of a life that, while not always easy to fathom, was nevertheless endlessly fascinating. In the year that it has taken to transform this text it has been reduced to its present size from a weighty tome approaching nine hundred manuscript pages, then 712, now half of that. Much that has been excised has been painful to leave out, for Yergan’s was a life that deserves more than superficial and facile judgments. Like the Africa he loved so well if not always wisely, nothing about it discloses itself easily or painlessly, and this author has himself paid a phenomenal price in order to try to tell it. What matters most is that you the reader permit yourself the luxury of suspending dis-belief and withholding judgment until such time as you have tried to work your way to the bitter end. In a work that has preoccupied this author intermittently through much of his adult life, the investment is incalculable. It is hoped that this tale will help in understanding not only him but ourselves as well.

  1

  Beginnings

  Boyhood, Baptists, Bangalore

  At the dawning of the twentieth century, Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois correctly anticipated that the supreme challenge of the century would be “the problem of the color line.” From the vantage point of many Americans of African descent his words rang resonantly, fueling divergent ideas and actions, regional, national, and supranational in scope. For one, Max Yergan, the more relevant of these contending currents of opinion would be African Redemption, accommodationism, Pan-Negroism, Pan-Africanism, and the burgeoning movement for world socialism. A product of an era, indeed a millennium, of transformation, he stood as heir to these traditions, his lif
e a mix of them.

  In a beautiful but race-conscious Raleigh, North Carolina, in a handsome old house at 210 East Cabarrus Street, built by his grandfather Frederick Yeargan (also spelled Yeargin or Yergin), Mack Yergan was born on Tuesday, July 19, 1892, to Frederick’s elder daughter, Lizzie. In time, “Mack” became “Max” and, late in life, the bearer would aver, somewhat grandiloquently, that his given appellation had originally been Maximilian, recalling a name used by several Holy Roman emperors, but little additional documentary evidence verifies this impressive-sounding assertion.1 Max’s mother (born June 1873) and her sister Eliza lived with their widower father, and both were mothers with a number of children by the century’s turning (Lizzie had borne five by 1900), making Frederick a grandfather and patriarch of an extended family.

  Fred Yeargan was a pillar of the Black community of Raleigh. A carpenter born in slavery in 1838, he actively supported the Baptist church, in which he wielded considerable influence, as well as occupying a seat on the Board of Trustees of Shaw Institute, later Shaw University, the subsequent alma mater of grandson Max. Well before his birth, then, young Mack was poised to inherit a significant portion of the nineteenth-century legacy of Christian-inspired education and the mission to “uplift” dark folk that proved personally and socially vital in the fin de siècle era.

  Little has surfaced on Max Yergan’s father. His name is absent from Yergan’s birth certificate, and nothing yet proves that he cohabited with Lizzie Yeargan at the time their boy was born. Yergan may have deliberately avoided referring to him for personal reasons. We cannot be certain of his name, for the birth record lists “unknown” in the designated space, but the handwritten words “Ed Price,” possibly added at a later date, replace a stricken initial entry. Anecdotal evidence hints that Max knew precisely who sired him, a man of mixed Native and Black heritage, and that little love was lost between them.2

  As to the Yergans’ social context, eight years before the grand drape descended upon the nineteenth century, upwardly mobile brown-skinned Raleighians had an oasis in a desert of doubt, denial, devastation, and degradation. Formal segregation still had not reached them as it had so many of their African-American relatives across the Southland. Near Shaw University, as Jonathan Daniels, White elite editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, reports, “all around our house Negroes and questionable white people came more and more to live.”3 Daniels suggests the tone of the neighborhood of Shaw:

  At least one of Booker T. Washington’s sons went to college there. And next door to us lived Wesley Hoover, as dignified an Anglo-Saxon gentleman, for all the little Negro blood in him, as I ever saw.… But Wesley Hoover had made his money, a great deal for a Negro in Raleigh in those days, running a saloon. That was an occupation which we understood was a special service rendered in assistance to the Devil. Yet he was a good neighbor and man. The South was not entirely simple, even then. But from us and from the Hoovers and from Shaw, the neighborhood fell off precipitately.4

  But the neighborliness that Daniels’s narrative suggests obscures some of the harder-edged realities of Negro Raleigh. The News and Observer was in Jon Daniels’s youth edited by his unrepentantly Negro-phobic, segregationist father, Josephus, later a valued cabinet official in several presidential administrations. Its pages did not then announce the birth of Negro children but regularly served up lurid tales of bestial Black criminals getting their just deserts. One story about a lynched Mississippi rapist was headlined “FOOD FOR VULTURES.” An interracial clash “culminating in bloodshed—9 Negroes and 2 White men reported killed,” topped by a vengeful bout of “whitecapping,” was headlined “A Race War in Arkansas.”5 And “He Got His Dues: A Camden County Fiend Hanged and Riddled: A Negro Brute Who Makes a Horrible Assault Is Visited with Retribution” headlined the story of how one Joe Barco, accused of the murder of Mrs. Frank Sanderlin with a hoe following a sexual assault, was dragged from his jail cell by a mob of five to six hundred men, emasculated, mutilated, hanged, and riddled by what a reporter took to be a thousand bullets fired into his “suspended carcass.”6

  The genteel nostalgia of Daniels’s reverie and the brutish reportage of the lynchings each speak eloquently about Raleigh. It was a place of civilized pretensions of every sort, yet tempered by a baser element of strict, retributive, racialistic comeuppance. This was rooted in a fierce fire-and-brimstone moralism, the kind that kept kids in Sunday school but also gave impetus to corporal and capital punishment, vigilantism, and the fearsome Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, the more positive benefits of religion were manifested by the Yankee Republican missionaries who traveled south from New England to uplift those benighted millions who had endured the base travails of bondage in the land of liberty. Max remembered one such bearer of the sacred word, Mary Phillips, a teacher at St. Ambrose Episcopal Parish School.7 With his memories of a strict upbringing at the hands of a firm but nurturing mother and a benevolently despotic grandfather, Yergan testified to having matured in an orderly environment, tightly bound by an ethos of piety, duty, and respect, all practiced in a rigidly evangelical Christian framework that often touted “old-time religion.”8

  An aspect of that framework was orientation to Africa. Max later reminisced that his grandfather had told him, on his deathbed, that it was his fervent wish that one day one of his grandsons would go as a missionary to “our people in Africa.”9 This injunction would become Yergan’s raison d’être, both symbolically and literally. And the elder man’s desire was by no means unusual in African-American communities during the 1890s. This was a time of great interest in Africa, especially among literate people of African descent, and in the notion of a divinely inspired mandate for “African Redemption” (a concept connecting certain Black and sympathetic White Christians). It found expression in “Ethiopianist” churches and back-to-Africa movements in predominantly Black localities throughout the far-flung African diaspora of the New World. Especially keen was the linkage between Africa and Christian mission, a pathway created by generations of Black Protestants, principally Baptists, Presbyterians, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zionist (AMEZ) churches. Yeargan, a Baptist, is said to have regularly discussed Africa with at least one of his closest friends and was associated with a scholarly endeavor that held deep and abiding concern for his natal continent’s transformation, Baptist-run Shaw University.

  In this regard, Yeargan was one of a select but not insignificant set of African-derived, Christian-inspired seekers of racial salvation. In the brutal post–Reconstruction era South, in order to endure in an epoch of heightened racial repression, choices seemed stark: migration or prostration. Those electing not to leave their localities often deemed it desirable to conciliate reactionary White “redeemers.” Precisely these circumstances made possible the ascendance of Booker T. Washington, the key Black figure from 1895 to 1915.

  In a landmark speech on September 18, 1895, at the opening ceremonies for Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition, Tuskegee Institute principal Washington lamented to a receptive, racially mixed audience that through ignorance and inexperience the post-Reconstruction African-American had begun focusing exclusively on the top professions, neglecting industrialism and manual labor. He urged these Black masses to “cast down your bucket where you are,” i.e., to acknowledge the existence of an “identity of interests” linking Black and White southerners beyond race and to accept the inestimable value of human effort as the engine of socioeconomic advance.

  For Washington race advancement was forthcoming only through hard work, dedication, and patience. In his early years, Max Yergan subscribed to that belief. Implicit and frequently explicit was the principal’s scorn for social protest as a vehicle through which to pursue racial uplift. This scorn made Washington’s policy of accommodating Redemption seem to be a capitulation to the resurgence of White supremacy. In Atlanta Washington phrased his anti-protest stance in chastening terms:

  The wisest o
f my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long, in any degree, ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.10

  In the short run, Washington’s nationally reported Atlanta address appeared to promise all things to all audiences. Southern Whites tended to treat it as acceptance that Blacks would no longer threaten their reassumption of political and racial suzerainty. Well-heeled northern Whites, including some socially minded robber-baron benefactors, reacted to accommodation as a rise in industrious Black self-reliance meriting moral and material aid. Northern African-Americans saw accommodation as inspiring them to continue struggling. But to African-Americans who remained in the South the Atlanta speech confirmed that constant effort, forbearance, and initiative were the requirements of the new age. Nowhere would this need become more apparent than among those African-Americans striving to secure an education. Yet there was another element evident in Washington’s philosophy and in the minds of each literate woman, man, and child of African descent who confronted the challenges of the latter 1800s. This was the position of Africa in the world and of their own conflicted connection as cultural castaways.