Max Yergan

by Anthony, David Henry, III;

  July 1919 found Yergan in London, meeting with K. T. Paul, A. K. Yapp, and K. J. Saunders.23 With regard to the modalities whereby Max might return to East Africa, it was the opinion of the English National Council (whose general secretary was Sir Arthur Yapp, recently named an officer of the Order of the British Empire) that Yergan would be the best choice for the first permanent YMCA secretary appointed in the East Africa Protectorate. India’s Paul (who had observed Max at close range in Bangalore) and Saunders each concurred. Though there were logistical and financial concerns, they were clear about wanting him in the position. It remained for them to convince government. By September Yergan ended his service for the Y War Work Council, becoming a field secretary after the armistice.

  An American Negro YMCA Secretary for Africa?

  In response to the favorable reputation Max gained as a result of his overseas war work, various requests were routed either to him or to his American YMCA colleagues in the International Committee, including invitations for service in foreign mission fields. Two proved particularly noteworthy, and both came from Africa. The first and more expected of the two was from East Africa, an area with which he was familiar, having survived it at its worst, at the peak of hostilities. The second derived from a far less likely, even startling quarter: the Union of South Africa.

  The East African invitation was a logical outgrowth of Yergan’s recent war experience. But it is necessary to provide some background on the second appeal, from South Africa. The first call for Yergan in South Africa had come in a July 1919 query shortly after his relief of John Hope in Paris. It was initiated by Oswin Boys Bull, newly chosen general secretary of the YMCA. Born in Barnstaple, Devon, Bull was a protégé of John Mott, whose 1906 South African visit had set in train the process by which Bull was recruited from Jesus College, Cambridge, to superintend South Africa’s fractious Student Christian Association.24 He had been informed about Yergan by officials in London and, writing from Cape Town, he asked Mott for further information. Bull had himself served two and a quarter years back home during the war, before being recalled by the English National Council.

  Bull had been in South Africa since 1907. Appointed in part to expand the reach of the SCA and YMCA to a previously unserved African population, Bull joined a series of earlier outsiders who had while visiting the Union championed the cause of extending the movement to all South Africa’s peoples, regardless of race. Two such sojourns had been of particular importance, that of Luther D. Wishard and Donald Fraser (founders of the World’s Student Christian Federation [WSCF]) in 1895 and that of John Mott and Ruth Rouse, she representing the English associations as well as the WSCF, in 1906. Despite or perhaps because of a keen awareness of the obstacles to doing this kind of outreach, all four found it both logical and necessary for them as practicing Christians who wished to bring about what Mott had famously proclaimed “the evangelization of the world in this generation.”

  Accordingly, by 1916 Bull had engaged the services of the sexagenarian John Knox Bokwe, perhaps the best known African Christian leader in the country, to assist him in this endeavor. Bokwe, a Lovedale graduate who aided its principal, James Stewart, was a journalist, evangelist, and renowned composer of Xhosa-language choral classics, arranging such memorable works as Ntsikana’s Bell and Ntsikana’s Great Hymn. Bokwe accompanied Bull across the veld into the “Native” institutions of the Eastern Cape as they initiated what would subsequently often be termed either “Native,” “Bantu,” or simply “Black” work. Bokwe had volunteered on a part-time basis, prompting Bull to secure financial support for him as well as to explore the possibility of finding someone who might take on the work on a full-time basis. Bull spelled this out in a detailed letter to Mott requesting his help in finding such a candidate:

  The work demands at least one whole-time Secretary and we ought to have a very wise and far-seeing man. It will be a magnificent field for the right man: perhaps the greatest today in Africa; but it is one which in five years’ time may be very much more difficult to develop. When I was in London a year or two ago [E. C.] Carter spoke to me very highly about a man called Yergan and suggested that he was a man of big enough caliber for work of this kind. I do not know at all what this man is doing at present, but I am wondering whether it is your opinion that he could be of service in this field, either for a visit or a longer period of service.25

  Mott’s response to Bull had been that he would need to make the case to Yergan personally in the strongest terms possible. At that time Max was still in France working under Ned Carter. East Africa, however, remained a strong possibility. A month later, Kenneth J. Saunders suggested to Arthur K. Yapp that England provide a national secretary for East Africa, seeking International Committee and Indian National Council support for African and Indian work. His idea was that they get a “really strong man” as national secretary, someone with “big sympathies” and a genuine missionary spirit. This person should be asked to have Yergan as an assistant national secretary, with a view toward Yergan succeeding him “when the work has become really indigenous.” Saunders had in mind Herbert Bryant, who, with Indian experience behind him, would be firm enough, with Max as his aide, “to stand up to the colonial and educate him to a right attitude to the people of the country.” This seemed to flow from Yergan’s India experience. It would, therefore, be advisable for Max to visit England.26

  Saunders thanked Carter for making it possible for Yergan to see him, along with K. T. Paul. On Thursday, July 31, 1919, Max talked briefly with Yapp, who noted that he would contact North American head Mott about the feasibility of a Yergan appointment for East Africa. Saunders’s scheme was that the International Committee assume support for an East African post. This was his aim: with Herbert Bryant acting as secretary, the English National Council could pay his salary, the International Committee could foot Max’s bill, and India’s National Council could provide for one or more Indian personnel.

  Aware that Yergan was scheduled to return home shortly, Saunders queried Ned Carter as to whether he might generate a letter asking the International Committee if they could keep Yergan on staff while he was in England and possibly give him a few opportunities to visit some of the colleges with a view to enlisting sympathy and “possibly U.S. support” for East African work. Both Paul and Saunders agreed that there was a great deal to be said for Max spending a few months in the United Kingdom to get in touch with the best student life there.

  Saunders also reasoned that Tissington Tatlow of the WSCF could be induced to take on Yergan as a temporary staffer. Saunders considered consulting Tatlow on this but felt that such consultation would be difficult until the attitude of the International Committee was settled. Saunders was planning to go to New York in September and therefore sought approval from Carter for his proposals, which he also had been discussing with Edward C. Jenkins. The Foreign Committee of the English National Council had approved Major Watson as Nairobi secretary for two years, with the proviso that his appointment would not affect any subsequent nomination of a permanent national secretary.27

  A week later, E. C. Carter wrote E. C. Jenkins, mentioning that Saunders had asked him to arrange for Yergan to go to London to arouse British YMCA interest in naming him to work in East Africa. Yergan, back from England, had made a favorable impression on Carter:

  I do not know how Saunders’ proposal will strike you. All I can say is that the YMCA ought to undertake the work for colored people in Africa. I know of few men, colored or white, who have shown finer leadership than Max Yergan and I certainly feel that he is ideally fitted to pioneer a great work in Africa. It is for you and the British YMCA to work out between you just what he will represent and by whom he will be supported if he goes.28

  Carter’s faith in Yergan was clear. His campaign continued with a letter to C. V. Hibbard indicating that as Yergan was proceeding to America in about a fortnight he hoped that after doing some work at home, followed by a period in the United Kingdom observing the British St
udent Movement in situ, Jenkins would make arrangements for him to go out to East Africa. Carter ended the note with his own patented rousing Y appeal:

  In view of Max’s intimate knowledge of our work in France, I wish you would strongly recommend to the proper authorities that he be used in speaking quite widely throughout the South soon after his arrival. He has done a great service in France just as he did in India and East Africa.29

  Yergan reentered the United States during the first week of September 1919, arriving on the 6th. Two days later he was back at his New York desk, having resumed his prior position as International Committee secretary, a job he would continue to do through January 1, 1921.30 All that he needed to do was prepare himself for the prospect of returning to the land of his fathers. It seemed just a matter of time, time like that he had passed while in Bangalore and then on the bloody battlefields of East Africa; time like that he had passed as he lay gravely stricken before recovering from fever; time like that he had passed when he returned to New York and then to Raleigh to visit family and friends. Time was a thing with which he had already learned how to deal. He knew what might await him in East Africa. After all, being there could not have been as hard as in wartime, so thinking it through and preparing for the task seemed a logical way to proceed. He would just have to wait.

  Once back home, Yergan received a detailed follow-up letter from Jenkins. The six key questions it raised were crucial for YMCA planning in the two foreign fields Max knew best, India and East Africa. The answers could come from what in British colonial-era parlance was often called a “man on the spot,” an experienced person in the storm center:

  1. In your contact with missionaries in British East Africa, did you discover their attitude toward the establishment of a civilian YMCA? Please … give… details.

  2. Is it your understanding with Carter that the English National Council is prepared to take aggressive steps toward starting Association work in British East Africa? What was the substance of the understanding as to men and equipment?

  3. If the Foreign Committee should undertake this work, what is your recommendation as to the inauguration of it, number of men required, places where it would be established and equipment needed?

  4. Estimate cost of equipment?

  5. How do prices for maintenance of secretaries compare with those of India?

  6. I have thought still further of the possibilities of this arrangement and believe that there is a good prospect of our doing something substantial provided we can get the whole Association Movement committed generally to a foreign policy.31

  Yergan made an additional London visit between August and September. Aside from funding issues of a technical nature that had immediate importance, the final question about a foreign policy for the YMCA seems pivotal, not only to the movement but also to Yergan’s own vision of mission in the YMCA for Africa and, perhaps, beyond. In both spiritual and temporal terms, he had already found respite from the provincialism of his upbringing, having rejected its stuffily parochial, homeland isolationism, had gravitated toward a wider sense of self, and had transcended nationality as a citizen of the world. Max would call upon every last ounce of personal resilience in those battles that lay ahead. In the end something occurred that he had not fully anticipated, due to the political climate of the times.

  Ideology: The Problem of the “Two Schools”

  While Yergan undertook his apprenticeship in India, East Africa, and postwar Europe, a new global ethos of social change, ranging from advocacy of reform all the way to revolution, was in full flower. Several aspects of this ethos would have appealed to him. One was the church-based reformism of the ecumenical movement that had given rise to the volunteer spirit animating the YMCA and its affiliate, the WSCF, a trend that Max was not only aware of but also helping to build. Another was the great Black migration northward from the rural and urban South to the North in the United States (in which Yergan had also taken part), a time of bold new initiatives for the amelioration of the African-American condition. Third, the optimism of the armistice stimulated a wide variety of international social, political, and cultural movements struggling to forge a more democratic world order in which dispossessed and voiceless majorities might play more pivotal roles in the workplace and the state. Many reflected new national identities.

  This widely scaled militancy had particular resonance for the Black Atlantic world. In colonial Africa and the Antilles, especially, guardians of the imperial gates monitored activities and utterances of assertive ideologues they labeled as dangerous propagandists. As the Bolsheviks had challenged the old order in colonies and semicolonies, so did African, Afro-Antillean, and African-American activists in the African diaspora, for whom imperialism and colonialism had domestic analogues. For the latter particularly, the rapid globalization of the European system became seen as necessitating the creation of mechanisms capable of overthrowing colonial hegemony—the oppressive state structures subjugating Black peoples worldwide—over time by any means necessary.

  For growing numbers of Africans and persons of African descent, the turmoil associated with the world war bolstered a broadening consciousness of one common condition—a wretchedness growing out of foreign paternalism, colonial disfranchisement, and cruel, callous, and crass exploitation. In their “Nonwhite” eyes, alleviation of these conditions required intense agitation, organization, and diplomacy. Such interests found expression in two complementary albeit competing strategies of Pan-Africanist propagandism, represented by W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Contemporaneously, another variety of Pan-Africanism had developed that, while eschewing what it took to be the strident polemics of the political varieties, nevertheless was linked to both of them—what Kenneth King called a missionary or evangelical form of Pan-Africanism. For Max, an heir to the Ethiopianist tradition of an earlier generation, evangelical Pan-Africanism was the earliest earmark of an evolving liberationist ideology.

  The international racial and political climate of 1919 was volatile. The Pan-African Congress that convened that year alerted government authorities in Britain, France, and the United States to possible dangers posed by a new Black internationalism threatening to undermine the teetering Euro-American political and economic order. At the same time, Marcus Garvey’s Harlem-based, transnationally focused Universal Negro Improvement Association, active in New York since 1916, dispersed its formidable print organ, The Negro World, across the United States and via Britain’s empire to the far reaches of the globe.

  At the same time these organizations appeared, the imperialistic powers most threatened by the Pan-African idea explored ways to mollify those elements most susceptible to its appeals. One approach entailed collusion between overseas missionary hierarchies and Whitehall, with which the former were in frequent, intimate contact. This was where YMCA missionary work came in, as an antidote to fiery popular agitation. It was toward this end that George Williams had been working when he shaped the group in the 1840s, when worker agitation was sweeping across England and into continental Europe.

  The Talented Tenth

  Yergan was in touch with a representative sampling of the African-American intelligentsia in the wake of the First World War. He nurtured these relationships in a decade of public appearances beginning in 1915, renewing them at intervals whenever furloughs became available to him. For the most part these work-centered connections are only hinted at in correspondence. Though Yergan was an inveterate chronicler of personal and professional experience, the majority of missives recovered in this research were generated for concrete business or political purposes. Yergan was either in search of speaking opportunities, usually combined with some type of monetary hook (honorarium, donation, or other material aid for a cause), or in quest of allies in particular campaigns, especially critical for YMCA work because it was always necessary for Colored Work Department projects to raise their own funding.

  Following his second period of military service, Max reached another milestone
in his life. On Wednesday, June 16, 1920, Yergan and Susan Delores Wiseman were married in the Salisbury, North Carolina, residence of Dr. and Mrs. James E. K. Aggrey.32 Their wedding ceremony was performed by fellow Colored Work Department secretary C. H. Tobias. In establishing Max’s bona fides, Aggrey later made a point of noting that it was attended by some of Salisbury’s “finest White ladies.”33

  By autumn Yergan was again on the road, in Atlanta on November 16, visiting Cincinnati on YMCA business from November 20 to 21, and then at West Virginia State College and Institute on November 22 as the guest of President John W. Davis and family. Clearly close to the Davis family, Max expressed affectionate concern then and later for his reception at the institute, remarking on the hospitality and favorable response to his appeal.34 By December, while Tobias and Johnson saw their way there, Yergan’s commitments in Columbus and Springfield, Ohio, St. Louis, and Kansas City precluded a hoped for return to the institute, which was especially disappointing as this marked the school’s week of prayer.35 Even though he was in absentia at year’s end, however, Max’s African appeal drew lucrative dividends.36

  But 1920 also revealed the strength of official opposition to Yergan’s candidacy as a permanent YMCA secretary in East Africa. Sir Edmund Northey, governor of Kenya, registered his view that he did not deem it “advisable to admit into East Africa negroes of a different caliber from those already there,” thus dashing Max’s hard-won hopes on the rocks of racism. Against the backdrop of the assertion of Garvey and Du Bois, Yergan become a casualty of colonialism. So while collecting funds for an African return, he had no idea where this might occur. By December South Africa resurfaced as a possibility. January 1, 1921, marked the end of Max’s U.S. service with the International Committee.