by Jemar Tisby
Augustus Tolton was born a slave in Missouri in 1854 and fled to the free state of Illinois during the Civil War. Having been baptized Catholic in Missouri, Augustus was enrolled by his mother at the school associated with St. Peter Parish in the small town of Quincy. Although young Augustus sensed a call to the priesthood at the age of sixteen, no Catholic seminary in the country would accept a black student. With the help of some benefactors, Augustus worked for ten years to save enough money to attend seminary in Rome. Augustus literally had to cross an ocean and travel to another continent to escape the racism that prevented him from becoming a priest in America. His persistence paid off, and in 1886, he became the first person of known African descent to become a Roman Catholic priest in the United States.7 The cardinal who ordained him reportedly told Augustus, “If America has never seen a black priest, it has to see one now.”8 Tolton went on to pastor St. Monica’s Parish, which became a thriving congregation of black Catholics on the south side of Chicago.
Pentecostals faced their own issues with racial compromise. William J. Seymour, born in Louisiana in 1870, suffered from blindness in one eye. In his midtwenties Seymour moved to Indianapolis for work and contracted small pox, which partially took away his sight. His lack of vision in one eye did not stop him from receiving what he believed were divine visions from God. He pursued an ardent religious life, and after he moved to Cincinnati in 1900, he became acquainted with the holiness doctrines that taught a person could be completely rid of sinfulness through the power of the Holy Spirit. It was his encounter with the white minister Charles Fox Parham that set him on a trajectory that would impact Christianity nationwide and beyond.9
After moving to Houston, Texas, in 1903, Seymour joined a small holiness church, and the pastor there put him in touch with Parham. The Pentecostal evangelist had recently started a school, and he encouraged Seymour to attend. Texas law at that time prohibited interracial schools, so Seymour had to sit in the hallway to listen to lectures while his white classmates sat in desks inside the room. Three years later in 1906, a holiness church in Los Angeles invited Seymour to preach for them, but they rejected his teachings on speaking in tongues and locked him out of the church. Undeterred, Seymour prayed and fasted for a month while he stayed as a guest in the home of Richard Asberry on Bonnie Brae Street. Seymour began preaching again, this time at the house. The crowds that gathered to hear him preach soon overwhelmed the small residence, so the evangelist began searching for a suitable venue for the worship services. He found the perfect site at an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal church on Azusa Street.10
After Seymour began services at the church on Azusa Street, hundreds of seekers crammed into the forty-by-sixty-foot structure to earnestly pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Seymour and his fellow Pentecostals believed that the Holy Spirit gifted believers with the ability to speak in tongues, divinely heal illnesses, and obtain the blessing of entire sanctification, that is, utter freedom from sin. Spontaneity marked the gatherings. No order of worship regimented the time. People got up and preached as the Spirit guided them. Many shouted, danced, or fell into holy trances. The phenomenon attracted people from a wide variety of racial backgrounds: “Blacks, whites, Chinese, and even Jews attended side by side to hear Seymour preach. Eventually what began as a local revival in a local black church became of interest to people all over the nation, regardless of race.”11 One participant marveled, “The ‘color line’ was washed away in the blood.”12 But this exceptional moment of interracial Christian unity would be short-lived.
As the revival spread from Azusa Street in Los Angeles to various locations in the South, some segments of the Pentecostal movement began to split along racial lines. The Church of God denomination initially promoted integrated gatherings. Eventually, at the request of a black minister and his supporters who desired more autonomy, the denomination permitted a separate black General Assembly so long as it was overseen by a white man. Even Charles Parham, Seymour’s erstwhile mentor, began to sharply criticize Seymour and the Azusa Street revival. He disdained the meetings “because of their ‘disgusting’ similarity to ‘Southern darkey camp meetings.’ ”13 By the time leaders had gathered to form the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America in 1948, not a single predominantly black Pentecostal denomination was invited to join. Although poor whites and blacks continued to mingle in more rural areas, the nationwide Pentecostal movement had become divided by race. Yet again, the church had demonstrated its complicity in racism, and the racial splits between certain Pentecostal denominations remained significant enough that the division required a very public moment of reconciliation called the “Memphis Miracle” in 1994.14
THE SOCIAL GOSPEL, FUNDAMENTALISM, AND RACISM
Concerned about the Industrial Revolution’s tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and the growing problem of urban poverty, some Christians proclaimed it their duty to ameliorate the conditions that led to such large-scale poverty and suffering. In 1896, Walter Rauschenbusch graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary and accepted a pastorate in the New York City neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. Stunned by the overcrowding, inhumane working conditions, pitiful wages, and chronic health issues local residents endured, “Rauschenbusch realized that in order to serve the spiritual needs of his congregation he had to address the whole of their lives.”15 He deployed his Christian faith to challenge the structures that dehumanized his neighbors and in 1907 wrote Christianity and the Social Crisis. The book stirred many Christians to become actively engaged in politics and reform in their communities in a theological tradition known as the “social gospel.”
In contrast to the social activism proposed in Christianity and the Social Crisis, a set of articles published between 1910 and 1915 called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth “repudiated the Protestant modernist movement” and “warned against getting too caught up in politics.”16 One chapter written by a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary criticized the social gospel: “To those who are crying for equality and opportunity and improved material conditions,” he admonished, “the Church repeats the divine message, ‘Ye must be born again.’ ”17 His statements both echo and foreshadow the sentiments of many theologically conservative Christians, who insisted that converting individuals to Christianity was the only biblical way to transform society. Fundamentalists dissuaded other Christians from certain forms of political involvement and encouraged them instead to focus on personal holiness and evangelism.18
Historian Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews points out that Fundamentalists harbored a race-laced understanding of theology. When publishers distributed volumes of The Fundamentals to pastors and other church leaders, they neglected to place black ministers on the list of recipients. Instead, white Christians who adhered to fundamentalism coded their movement as white. When they explicated their beliefs, “white fundamentalists relied on racial interpretations that marginalized [African Americans].” These contenders for the faith “constructed their racial notions on the twin pillars of black inferiority and white paternalism, pillars that were common beliefs among whites in general.”19
For their part, black Christians in the 1920s and 1930s did not fit neatly into either fundamentalist or social-gospel categories. Some advocates of the social gospel treated the Bible as a human book and subjected it to modern critical literary theories. In the view of some black Christians, this theological method seemed to substitute “old-time religion” for a new and unfamiliar kind of faith. Fundamentalism, while more recognizable in its emphasis on the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, fell short in failing to include a focus on racial progress. Black Christians might take a more traditional or a more progressive stance, depending on the issue. While they often exhibited conservatism in areas such as biblical interpretation, dancing, and prohibition, they also applied their religious beliefs to questions regarding the spiritual, political, and social equality of black people.20
The ongoing conflicts that social go
spelers, fundamentalists, and black Christians faced over matters of race, as well as over the challenging conditions of urban environments, formed part of a broader picture of racism that pervaded areas beyond the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The decades that followed would only further exacerbate these racial tensions.
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION
When Woodrow Wilson ran for his second term as president in 1916, his campaign slogan was “He Kept Us Out of War.” At the time, the United States did not consider the ongoing conflict in Europe to be a problem that required American intervention. Wilson initially took a neutral stance, but escalating acts of aggression committed by the Germans toward the United States convinced Wilson to present Congress with a resolution of war in April 1917. During Wilson’s resolution speech, he pledged to “make the world safe for democracy.”21
As with every war America has fought, black soldiers participated despite racial discrimination within the military ranks. More than 350,000 black people served in the US armed forces during World War I, but they remained largely confined to menial jobs. Only about 42,000 black soldiers saw battle, and even then, white leaders questioned their valor and capability. Still, black soldiers often distinguished themselves. France awarded their highest medal, the Croix de Guerre, to the all-black 369th, 371st, and 372nd regiments for their fierceness on the front lines.22 But no amount of courage abroad could eliminate antiblack racism at home.
Armed with a stronger conviction to fight for their civil rights, returning black soldiers refused to defer to Jim Crow laws and inspired other black people to do the same. W. E. B. Du Bois captured the spirit of their resistance in an essay titled “Returning Soldiers.” He declared, “We return fighting. Make way for democracy! We saved it in France, and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.”23 With a firmer sense of their own civil rights, many black activists began engaging in armed self-defense and open resistance to racism.
Just a few months after the United States entered World War I, a “race riot” broke out in East St. Louis, Illinois, which sits across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. The riot began when a local aluminum plant brought in black strikebreakers to replace white workers who refused to work. In response, a group of white men drove through a black neighborhood of East St. Louis firing their guns. When two white plainclothes police officers drove through the neighborhood a short time later, they were shot and killed by residents, who did not recognize them as cops.24
The white mobs that descended on the city afterward did not have a specific target for their vengeance. Any black person would do. One family—a husband, wife, teenage son, and thirteen-year-old daughter—were visiting East St. Louis for the day when a mob unhooked their streetcar from the power lines. They pulled the family off and assaulted them with bricks. The woman was knocked unconscious, and she awoke in an ambulance lying next to her murdered husband and son. Her daughter had been kept safe from the mob by a sympathetic white store owner who hid her until the danger had passed. Official reports put the death toll at thirty-nine black men, women, and children as well as nine white people. The unofficial count, the one that included the people who had died in fires or were thrown into the river, reached over a hundred.25
The unrest in East St. Louis was a precursor to what became known as the Red Summer. In 1919, more than twenty-five cities across the nation, usually large urban areas outside of the South, descended into bloody racial conflict. A few of the more well-known riots occurred in Chicago, Washington DC, and Houston. Dr. George Edmund Haynes wrote a report on the causes and impact of Red Summer, and he concluded that much of the violence occurred because of “the persistence of unpunished lynching” that gave whites permission to seek retribution through mob action. Individuals in these groups fed each other’s racial hatred so that “a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.”26 The presence of racial hatred in these areas outside the South demonstrated that the violence of white supremacy was not confined to former Confederate states.
Despite the pervasive racism that corrupted communities nationwide, it still seemed better for many black folks to live anywhere other than the Jim Crow South. This led to a mass movement of black people from the South to cities in the North, Midwest, and East and West coasts, which has been referred to as the Great Migration. It would not be wrong to cast these migrating blacks as refugees fleeing the racial terror of the South. Some major cities saw their black populations more than double between 1920 and 1930. Chicago’s black population grew from 109,500 to 234,000, New York City from 152,000 to 328,000, and Detroit from 41,000 to 120,066.27 These rapid and massive changes were not without problems. The influx of southern black people changed white perceptions of the city and increased interracial tensions.
Around this time, Marcus Mosiah Garvey began bringing his international perspective to bear on the global issue of black disenfranchisement. Garvey grew up in Jamaica and then spent time in Costa Rica. He traveled broadly and went to school in England. Eventually, he became an advocate for Pan-Africanism, a view that emphasized the unity of all African-descended people throughout the world. Garvey started the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and established his base of operations in Harlem. Though it had a brief and dynamic life as an organization, UNIA became the largest black organization in the nation. Garvey and UNIA started a newspaper, developed the Black Star shipping line, held international conferences, and became a touchpoint for nearly any black person interested in racial pride and uplift.28 Garvey’s UNIA coincided with the rise of the black population in urban areas like New York City and capitalized on a renewed sense of opportunity and assertiveness felt by many black people in the 1910s and 1920s.
Following on the heels of the Great Migration, the Great Depression further exacerbated interracial tensions when it began in 1929, leading to skyrocketing unemployment. This led to fierce competition for jobs between poor ethnic whites and the newly settled urban blacks. The depression quickly overwhelmed Christian churches and nonprofit organizations, and in the midst of the worst economic disaster in the nation’s history, many charitable institutions ran out of money and resources to help the downtrodden. Poor people could not offer much help to other poor people. “Their churches and charities were broke. It was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt.”29
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the presidency in the 1932 election, and he held office until his death in 1945, just three months into his fourth term. During his time as president, he initiated the New Deal and instituted massive reforms that shifted the relationship between the federal government and everyday citizens. Prior to the 1930s, citizens viewed the role of the federal government as limited to protecting the rights of the people by providing checks on the government’s ability to interfere with the practice of religion, assembly, and speech. The New Deal reforms ushered in a “rights revolution—that is, the extension of citizenship to include positive rights.”30 The government became involved in proactively securing and protecting the rights of its citizens, not simply restraining action that might impinge on individual liberties. Although FDR did not pass all the legislation he desired, some of the lasting results of the New Deal include Social Security, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the end of Prohibition.
Liberal Christians generally supported the New Deal and, more specifically, the efforts on the part of the federal government to assist the poor and to grant workers the right to organize against corporations to secure better conditions. The Catholic Church weighed in on labor issues with its Quadragesimo Anno, an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI in 1931 that warned of the dangers of unrestricted capitalism and declared that the function of the state was to protect everyone’s rights, but that “chief consideration ought to be given to the weak and the poor.”31 The Federal Coun
cil of Churches updated its teachings in 1932 to explicitly promote “the right of employees alike to organize for collective bargaining and social action.”32 But not all Christians were as excited: “Fundamentalists were building vast institutional and associational networks within which Christian mission was reduced almost entirely to winning converts.”33 Many conservative Christians were not enthused about the growing influence of the federal government and its attempts to impose regulations on public institutions and private enterprises.
In 1937, Pepperdine College opened its doors in South Central Los Angeles. The founder and funder of the college, George Pepperdine, was a devout Christian and a millionaire who had gained his fortune in auto parts. Pepperdine applied his business acumen to starting the school, and from his initial concept early in 1937, he formed a small startup team that managed to open the school later that fall after just six months of preparation. The college’s urban location promised to be an ideal setting to apply the college’s “Head, Heart, and Hands” philosophy of intellectual development, spiritual growth, and training in practical trades.34
Pepperdine’s efforts to start the college stemmed from his sincere desire to instill in young people both a practical education and a vibrant Christian faith. The Scopes trial of 1925—concerning the teaching of evolution in public schools—had convinced many conservative white Christians that public education promised only to inculcate their children with liberal social values and teach concepts that ran contrary to their interpretation of the Bible. Pepperdine stated that he “had seen young people go off to college with strong Christian faith and after four years of training under the guidance of cynical and materialistic professors, return home unsure of their spiritual nature . . . and faith in God.” By contrast, his college would be subject to “conservative, fundamental Christian supervision.”35