Max Yergan

by David Henry Anthony III

  From May 19 to May 29, he proudly attended the Colored Work Department’s annual Kings Mountain Conference, the foremost gathering of Black YMCA staffers. Years later member Ben E. Mays described it this way:

  Only men with a message that spoke to the needs of Negroes, and who had a point of view that enabled Negro students to look more hopefully beyond their circumscribed plight, were invited to speak at Kings Mountain. No other organization, except the Young Women’s Christian Association, was providing this kind of leadership for Negro students. They found identity at Kings Mountain. It was an oasis in a desert of discrimination. It could do these things because the conference was under the auspices of Negro executives and administrators.23

  A month after Kings Mountain, Yergan submitted a request for a year’s leave in order to clear the way for his Indian sojourn. Then on Sunday, July 9, at the YMCA Chesapeake Summer School in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, he was praised by association officials. On the dais beside Max stood Presidents Henry T. McDonald of Storer College and S. C. Hodges of Lincoln University, Richard C. Morse, YMCA International Committee consulting general secretary and sometime movement historian, Dean Moorland, and Colored Methodist Episcopal bishop Robert E. Jones. The Reverend Dr. Jones commemorated the fond farewell in an editorial reaching out to readers of his New Orleans–based Southwest Christian Advocate. Transforming the printed page into a bully pulpit, Jones sermonized,

  Some of us have been waiting a long time for the Negro to exert himself in the world movement for world evangelization and now we have a concrete example: A young Southern Negro educated in the South has gone under the direction of the YMCA of North America to India, where he is to work among an entirely different race than his own, among British subjects, and is the first Negro so far as we know to do missionary work other than in Africa. The name of this young man, whose frank, open, sincere, devout, pious face we are presenting in this connection is Max Yergan.24

  After saying his goodbyes, Yergan prepared for his overseas adventure.

  Traveling on the Nieuw Amsterdam he had a memorable voyage, joining YMCA leader Sherwood Eddy, Carter, and other passengers en route to India via London. Max’s Atlantic crossing also occurred in the company of peace campaigner Kirby Page, who made reference to him in his daily journal. Enormously impressed by the earnest African-American missionary, Page succinctly summarized their talks. On July 12, their “second day out,” Page wrote this about his new acquaintance:

  Early this morning Max Yergan and I piled out and had a mile run on the boat deck. The salt air was most bracing and the exercise warmed us up and after a cold salt bath we were ready for a hearty breakfast. I must tell you more about this fellow Max. He is a young colored chap, 23 years of age, a graduate of college and he also spent some time at the Y.M.C.A. College in Springfield, Mass. He has been a traveling Y.M.C.A. Secretary among his own people in the Southwest. He is going over to India for a year’s work in connection with the India territorial forces. He then expects to come back and devote himself to Y.M.C.A. work among his own people. He is a very alert and wide awake chap and is really most handsome; has a very strong face and is really a strong man in more ways than one. He is a more earnest and consecrated Christian and I am looking forward to knowing him more intimately.25

  Three days later Page again made reference to Yergan. Touching on a topic that had moved Max’s colleagues before and after this transoceanic voyage, the pacifist leader wrote,

  Every night before I go to bed I get up on the top deck for a little quiet time of prayer and meditation. I have had some most helpful heart to heart talks with the different fellows in the group. We are all getting very close together. It is wonderful how quickly friendships are formed when there is a unity of spirit and purpose. The young colored fellow, Max Yergan, is making a profound impression upon me. I admire him tremendously and feel that he is as fine a fellow as one could desire for a real friend. Truly Jesus Christ does transcend all racial and color lines. In him all are brothers.26

  In their brief time together Page had been able to capture that quality of Yergan’s personality, which seemed to move so many of his colleagues, Black or White, whenever they encountered him. Some remarked on a look on his face, a kind of saintly innocence; others noted his stalwart manner and muscular bearing. Similar observations appeared consistently in public and private, across the globe.

  A second leg of his journey to India began as Yergan alighted in London, gateway to Britain’s empire. There, with Harold S. Gray, whom Max had also met on deck, he went to the theater.27 He also met YMCA officials and, on July 30, spoke at a Sunday rally at London’s Central YMCA on Tottenham Court. A week later he was en route to Bombay on a fortnight’s voyage that left from Marseilles. By August 30 he had reached Bangalore, entering a new world.

  Yergan’s next six months were spent ministering to the diminutive Christianized population of an ancient region whose familiarity with this foreign faith was all but inseparable from British imperial hegemony and consequent cultural colonialism, since modern Indians could view it as an alien intruder fit for only serfs, harijan, women, malcontents, and diverse déclassé elements whose spiritual waywardness seemed tantamount in the popular mind to treason—synonymous with a betrayal of Mother India. While Indian YMCA leaders would play a vital role in the nationalist struggle, the YMCA itself was both a creation and reflection of the colonial past and present.

  Observing this reality, Max made a number of bold statements, like this frankly critical reflection:

  The Indian student is questioning the Christianity of missionaries who deny him just the very things that we have to contend for as regards speakers at our conference—etc. There is also the same endless number of churches and divisions of churches. In this respect there is a great problem. One sees at times, however, some fine examples of church federation and even coöperation and union. As to opportunities for service, they are numberless. There is a very distinct contribution our men could make, providing Christian brotherhood and coöperation were practiced by the missionaries who have come out here.28

  The concept that paternalistic foreign missions, denominational divisiveness, and colonially rooted racial chauvinism could impede the realization of Christianity’s ideals periodically recurred in Max’s overseas writings from this time onward. His Indian experience marked his first face-to-face encounter with nationalism in an imperialist setting.

  Beyond such references as this one, shared with a friend and chronicler in an unpublished manuscript, and some equally rare tidbits that survive buried in YMCA house organs, little has come to light about this poignant period in Max’s life. It is clear from these references, however, that these months were decisive and memorable in the formation of his consciousness. They also shed light on some obscure aspects of YMCA work.

  Bangalore served as an assembly center for casualty sufferers and combatants preparing for front-line duty. The Y role was to build morale for these military personnel through prayer, Bible study, and recreational activities. This was where Yergan would come in.29 His service, inasmuch as it had Asian, African, European, and American dimensions and ranged far beyond the ordinary boundaries of war service in any one theater, had an internationalist flavor. Further, it began earlier than that of most of his fellow “Yanks” of any color (outside the YMCA, that is) and persisted longer than that of the average American Expeditionary Force doughboy. It had four components: (1) Bangalore, August–circa December 1916; (2) East Africa (principally between Dar es Salaam and Mombasa), circa January 1917–1918; (3) Camp Lee, Virginia, 1918; and (4) Paris, July–August 1919. For the moment we confine our attention to the Indian episode. Yergan’s East African and ancillary auxiliary work shall be treated in the ensuing chapter.

  When Max decided to answer Ned Carter’s call, he became one of the vanguard members of a cadre of African-American YMCA secretaries mobilized from a score of primarily urban, racially segregated Colored Work Department branches that yielded 2
68 volunteers in home service and forty-nine in overseas army work.30 In the main, these city associations, to which must be added the campus collections of historically Black colleges like Yergan’s alma mater, Shaw, also financed the salaries of each sponsoree. Though these were sometimes matched to some degree by the national office, the greatest share came from local fund raising. Those entering service with foreign allied forces were granted ranks, including commissions, commensurate with regulations. Yergan, then, was to be, for all intents and purposes, a member of the British Army—although his pay just happened to be financed chiefly by a strapped North American Black Y.

  From the point when Yergan touched land in India, he was faced with powerful and pungent images. So thoroughly captivated was he by the sights and sounds of Bombay that fifty years later he confessed to having been taken with the trainside vendors hawking pan (a chewable betel-nut mixture encased in a betel-leaf cover) along with railway refreshments he remembered as biri and metai.31

  Equally important is the way in which Indian audiences viewed him. In an age of expanding global color consciousness, Yergan found that earlier experiences in the historically Black colleges of the southern United States were resonant for Indian students and professors, viewed colonially as people of color. A pivotal aspect of Yergan’s work, therefore, included addressing groups of Indians about American race matters, in dialogues touching both speaker and hearers, perhaps even seeking common cause.

  In 1916, South India writhed under several overlapping, entrenched systems of group privation, prejudice, and privilege. In an era of increasingly vocal national consciousness, the daily indignities of the British presence led resisters to seek solace in cultural reformation. But southerners were quite often exposed to the scorn of chauvinistic northerners, a phenomenon not wholly beyond the ken of Yergan as a son of North America’s stigmatized South. Some Indians, no doubt, may have been surprised to see this tan man, whose light-brown hue might have momentarily led a few to take him as one of their own. Around hut campfires he probably learned of the differences in perception and orientation of North and South, as he dined on curd rice and listened to centuries-old songs of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

  Yergan’s teaching typically took shape in the huts that housed YMCA personnel the world over. Here he conducted riveting bioscope (an early form of motion picture projector) presentations and demonstrated proper deportment for upwardly mobile peasants enraptured with the prospect of urbanism and seeking respite from the demands of family, village, and fealty to the ruling strata, as well as release from the thralldom of low caste, as not everyone was favored by fortune to be born a Brahmin. Some of those whose karma and dharma led in other directions responded to the appeal of Christianity and the Y.

  In spite of the admittedly checkered history inhibiting the spread of the tradition, Christendom was no idle interloper in Bangalore. Christian proselytization in India began in earnest during the fifteenth-century contacts initiated by Portuguese mariners, compradors, fortune seekers, and fervent Jesuit friars and was continued by both fellow (and frequently rival) Catholics and Protestants. By Yergan’s time a large Catholic cathedral and a Wesleyan church constituted material evidence of this activity, as did numerous “Christianized tribes,” in the cultural sphere.32

  Yergan did provide accounts of race relations while in India. In a letter to Jesse Edward Moorland, his mentor, he made reference to talks undertaken with White fellow missionaries. While concise, his description leaves little doubt about how these exchanges left him feeling. “It’s funny to see here the same old color question. It reacts on me in just a bit different manner from what I get in America. I have had some solid laughs on the missionaries here. You will be interested in hearing some of them.”33

  Had he not been an American, Ned Carter might well have seemed one of the laughable missionaries Max had in mind, but it is more likely that he was alluding to those who had gone out from the British Isles, to whom a Black American in a position of true responsibility might have seemed somewhat outlandish. Either because he desired to fit in or because the situation exerted severe behavioral demands, Yergan’s exposure to English classism in this colonial setting apparently “spoilt” him with a teasing taste of an enticing level of leisure for which he thirsted from those days onward. Even as an underpaid Y worker, Yergan, like so many overseas sojourners, could lounge in a satrapy as a sahib.

  It would not be accurate to say that Indian service made an anti-imperialist of him, at least not in the short run anyway. The same missive that is referred to above, for example, extolled “the great liberal and wise policies of the British government,” closing with the entreaty that “God grant that such principles might soon prevail in America.” And it seems that this exposure during his formative years played a critical role in affecting certain habits that persuaded some subsequent acquaintances to regard Yergan as aristocratic or eccentric, such as penchants for attendance by domestic servants, for “high tea,” and for daily formal dinners served at precisely the same hour.34

  This suggests other questions, whose responses one can only guess. How did Yergan comport himself in the company of English Indian “hands”? Did he choose to eschew informal Americanisms? Might it have proven attractive to affect Anglo-Indian Anglice? Or did affectation merely make some see in him more of a monkeylike minstrel? It is not uncommon for Americans to cringe in the face of their Old World “betters,” and it would have been difficult not to try to fit in with people who so proudly pulled the reins of power. Maybe even Carter did so.

  And how might the myth of Raleigh’s “slave aristocracy” have articulated with Yergan’s intimate confrontation with the English crown? Was there some area of convergence between his own covetous contact with quaint customs that reinforced nascent ideas of uniqueness, now that he was a world traveler? How then could he return to the milieu that had sheltered and shaped him, after meeting the majestic maharajah of Mysore?

  Yet Mother India struck Yergan in ways he probably had not anticipated. Once, upon arriving in Madras to address a Y student conference, he was shocked to find that the hall where he had been scheduled to deliver a lecture was empty. The officer in charge offered his apologies, explaining that the Indian conferees were commemorating the anniversary of the passing of Booker T. Washington. Having read a Hindustani translation of Up from Slavery, they wished to pay homage to the late leader. “Perhaps Mr. Yergan might be able to visit them another time,” said the ranking official.35 In a world shaped by race and racial identification, Booker Washington’s example was no less powerful for legions of nonwhite colonials than it had proven to be for North Americans, Black and White alike.

  The rising elite stratum of European-educated, typically Christian colonials in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, as well as other places, could see in Washington’s autobiography a plan to achieve uplift for the masses of their own people, particularly those restricted by caste, class, race, and/or prior servile status. Wittingly or unwittingly, Yergan played a part in this process. From him, Indian youth and students could receive the story of Negro achievement straight from the horse’s mouth. He, like the departed Wizard of Tuskegee (as some saw Washington), was up from slavery, having learned the tale from grandfather Frederick, who rose above it. Washington’s admirers included indigenes like A. J. Appasamy, who published a two-part treatise entitled “A Challenge to India’s Educators” in the leading YMCA journal, in which he attempted to acquaint local teachers with the virtues of the methodology of industrial education that had uplifted America’s Negroes.36

  In colonial India, as in English-ruled Africa and the Caribbean, imperial functionaries, settlers, and complicit missionaries all could exert a measure of ideological control over their indigenous populations by elevating selected parts of Washington’s text that emphasized not merely his message of self-help but also his anxiety about politics and entering into labor combinations. Since literacy was to remain limited to a privileged, select few, already ide
ntified and under close supervision in each mission, often chaperoned through monitored ranks in the civil service, it was not usually difficult to keep track of these individuals or their allies. Thus, an argument might be made that Yergan was functioning in ways that proved pleasing to the British Empire, accommodating, aiding, or abetting the imperialistic status quo.

  Other Indians were also intrigued by American Negroes and their status, however. Mohandas K. Gandhi, doubtless swayed by his South African experiences but above all by methodical and prodigious research on global racial questions, took considerable pains to acquaint himself with slavery and its aftermath in the United States, with a view toward extracting relevant lessons for India’s freedom struggle. Somewhere along the line Yergan learned about him and may have been able to read and possibly encounter him, as he told Ruby Pagano in some wintry reminiscence about India.37

  2

  World War One

  Max Yergan’s World War One experiences were atypical for Americans of African descent. They were also unusual for doughboys serving overseas after maturing in North America. They began in Asia, continued in Africa, and, after a return home, culminated in Paris once the armistice was declared. Max had two “bits” of overseas service, one beneath the Union Jack, another under the Stars and Stripes. Each had its own peculiar challenges and taught a particular set of life lessons. Travel also brought him closer to other lands and peoples, as a “world citizen.”

  Yergan’s war began late in 1916, when he answered Ned Carter’s call to serve in India.

  Approaching mid-October Yergan’s life took another turn as he prepared to leave India for East Africa, thereby coming closer to realizing his late grandfather Frederick’s missionary dream. The prospect of doing African work intrigued him no end, as he indicated to Dean Moor-land in this evocative passage: