Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Image from Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905)

  Source: Reproduced at Documenting the American South, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/dixonclan/dixon.html.

  Through Dixon, the cross became the ultimate symbol of the Klan. Indeed, the popular association of burning crosses and white robes with the Klan stems not from their origins in the Reconstruction era but from Dixon’s fictions and their popularization in the epic film Birth of a Nation. Not for the first, or last, time in American history, a piece of racialized popular culture “created” reality and history for a viewing public. Duly outfitted, Klansmen of the 1910s and 1920s became champions of Christ. Scene descriptions and illustrations accompanying the story in The Clansman showed Klan members and their horses with large crosses emblazoned on their robes. Then, at secret ceremonies, Klan members raised flaming crosses to proclaim their allegiance to Christ and white supremacy. The pioneering film director D. W. Griffith picked up on these images and placed them directly into Birth of a Nation. In one of the film’s promotional posters, atop a rearing and powerful horse, a Klansman thrust the “fiery cross of the Ku Klux Klan” into the air.

  When the new Klan formed after Birth of a Nation, members placed Jesus and the cross squarely at the center of their white supremacist culture. They did so effectively, influencing local and state politics through considerable swaths of the country. The opening prayer of the officially prescribed Klan ritual of the 1920s called members to adopt “the living Christ” as the “Klansman’s criterion of character.” One Texan put it simply: Jesus “was a Klansman.” Christ’s act upon the cross perfectly symbolized the Klan’s turn to Jesus as the emblem of suffering, pain, service, and sacrifice. “Since Jesus’s wounded body bore the sins of the world,” a Klan historian explained, “a member should follow Jesus’s example. . . . It was not necessary to sacrifice one’s life, but to sacrifice one’s selfhood for the greater body of Klan membership.”

  The white robe, its symbols, and burning crosses became emblems of the Klan’s claim to Christ. As one minister in the movement surmised, “I think Jesus would have worn a robe.” A Klan newspaper explained, “Pure Americanism can only be secured by confidence in the fact that the Cross of Jesus Christ is the wisest and strongest force in existence.” The Klan’s cross, uniting faith and nation in one symbol, had been “sanctified and made holy nearly nineteen hundred years ago by the suffering and blood of the crucified Christ, bathed in the blood of fifty million martyrs who died in the most holy faith, it stands in every Klavern of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a constant reminder that Christ is our criterion of character.” Illustrations from Klan histories of the age had Klansmen in the place of Christ’s disciples. They helped him pass out bread and fish to the multitudes without food. On another occasion, Jesus distributed the “Tenets of the K.K.K.” as spiritual and civic nourishment for “100% Americans.”

  The white, militant Christ of the suffering South had become an American emblem of segregation and white supremacy. When Birth of a Nation appeared, it was a national, not just a regional, hit. Klansmen now marched in public and exercised significant influence in local and state governments. From the end of the Civil War to the early 1920s, Jesus in the United States became a symbol of white supremacy. For many, and certainly for those with white nationalist sympathies, Jesus’s whiteness defined his essence.

  RACE AND THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

  Figures such as Madison Grant and Thomas Dixon and his ilk represented the nativist side of Progressive-Era thought. Ultimately, however, the most powerful movement (over the long term) to emerge from this time came from those who interpreted the social gospel as a call to swim against the deeply held currents of American racism.

  In the mid- to late nineteenth century, pastors, writers, working-class union organizers, and women involved in missions work developed a broad-based “social gospel” movement. It may also be called social Christianity. The one unifying element in the diverse coalition emphasized applying the lessons of Christianity to social life, and in doing so to make the social order more in keeping with God’s plan for human life. Social gospelers came in all varieties, and enunciated a multitude of ideas and programs, but that one general concept united them.

  Historians once criticized the leaders of the social gospel movement of ignoring issues of racial justice. More recent studies have shown how deeply social gospelers were involved in racial issues, including in the formation of the NAACP and other organizations for racial reform. Moreover, there was a significant black social gospel movement, whose overriding emphasis obviously lay with issues of social justice. The towering figures here include W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Richard R. Wright, but there were many others besides.

  In some sense, black churches were a natural home for social gospel ideas, for black religious institutions had no choice but to address directly social issues. After Reconstruction, there was no other institution in black communities that could do so. Political outlets for those ideas were very few and mostly powerless.

  From possessing an almost frightening power, to languishing as frustrated fellowship, the black church came under scrutiny both for its potential and its problems. Black churches had to be all things to all black people, something no institution could do. Writers and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois struggled to understand how spiritual power implicit in the black churches could be unlocked and then unleashed into a social world whose entire premise rested on the degradation of African Americans. Philosophers, preachers, and scholars contemplated the black church as a spiritual force, a potential base for power, and a sociological drag on progress. Moreover, from W. E. B. Du Bois forward, those who studied black religious institutions (dominated by black Baptist churches) veered between visions of liberatory potential and sociological explorations of why these poetically powerful institutions so often apparently failed to act as engines of social progress. Du Bois pioneered this in his essays in Souls of Black Folk as well as his landmark sociological study The Negro Church.

  As a scholar and social scientist, Du Bois was often critical of the black church as an institution for its increasing insularity, its focus in the twentieth century on internal growth and power politicking, and its inability before the civil rights movement to utilize its enormous resources effectively on behalf of African American people. At the same time, however, Du Bois as a poet and sensitive essayist understood the kind of powerful work going on in the rituals and the ostensibly “otherworldly” preaching emanating from black pulpits.

  The black social gospel movement coalesced around newly formed organizations such as the NAACP, in large “institutional churches” in cities such as Chicago and Atlanta, and with intellectual, college-educated men and women such as Du Bois, John Hope, and Mary Church Terrell. They refused to accept the bounds of habitations handed down to them by American society.

  The best example of a southern black institutional church where the minister preached the social gospel was Henry Proctor’s 1st Congregational Church in Atlanta. Seeking to serve the body, mind, and spirit of his congregants, Proctor took the pulpit at First Congregational in 1894. Historically, the church had been a biracial congregation pastored by whites. By Proctor’s tenure, however, the congregation was all black, as Congregationalist churches in the South followed the larger pattern of racial separation in religion. Proctor immediately doubled the church membership to four hundred, in part through his efforts at making church activities more relevant to the everyday lives of congregants. He launched a local chapter of the Christian Endeavor Society, a nationwide organization of Christian youth, and a Working Men’s Club. Proctor had stayed in Atlanta even during the riots of 1906, when white gangs attacked African Americans on the street and set fires to black neighborhoods. After the brutal melee, he served on a local biracial “Committee on Church Cooperation,” where he tried to dispel rumors of race riots that could set tense southern cities ablaze. He condemned the social and political apathy of white
ministers and tried to align himself with progressive forces in the white community.

  Proctor eventually fled to Atlanta to take up a pulpit in Brooklyn. In doing so, he followed the pattern of the Great Migration of African Americans through the middle years of the twentieth century. The churches such ministers pastored in the North were virtually by definition social gospel, or institutional, churches, as they provided vital help to communities denied access to full job opportunities, citizenship rights, and public services. Those churches met a series of stiff challenges to conventional black Christianity. Some emerged from new institutions such as the African Orthodox Church that came out of the movement engineered in New York City by Marcus Garvey, an advocate for African emigration; others came from a panoply of relatively anonymous religious entrepreneurs, both Christian and others, who offered black folk alternative spiritual visions and homes. One of the most important of those was Holiness/Pentecostalism, the most significant American religious movement of the twentieth century.

  EARLY PENTECOSTALS AND RACE

  There was another challenge to the bounds of habitations in American religious life, as well. That came not from the intellectual class, but from ordinary men and women seeking an outpouring of the spirit. They burst onto the scene in the Holiness and Pentecostal movement. Their theology insisted on believers achieving a complete purification of the spirit and possession by the Holy Spirit, often evidenced by speaking in tongues and other visible manifestations. While the movements came from many sources and bases, the single most important was the work of William J. Seymour (1870–1922), a black Louisianan who moved to Los Angeles in 1906. From there, he led a series of spiritual revivals that quickly attracted international crowds. More than any single moment, the Azusa Street revivals in Los Angeles sparked the worldwide movement of Pentecostalism.

  The relationship between white and black believers in early Pentecostalism emerged most interestingly and ambiguously in one of the fledgling movement’s originary moments in Los Angeles. There, Pentecostalism first drew widespread public attention and spread to the rest of the nation. Two key figures in the history of Pentecostalism in the South were present at Azusa: William J. Seymour, a Louisiana native who led the Azusa Street revivals and the early Apostolic Faith Mission; and Charles Harrison Mason, a black Mississippian by birth converted to Pentecostalism at the Los Angeles meetings, and later a founder of the Memphis-based Church of God in Christ.

  Born in 1870 in Louisiana, as a young man William J. Seymour traveled frequently, worked odd jobs in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and contracted the smallpox that permanently damaged his left eye. In 1903, the future prophet began attending a series of meetings in Houston led by Charles Parham, a white holiness preacher. Following a policy of segregation mandated by the location, Parham exiled Seymour to the hallway and generally showed little interest in his black devotee. But Parham’s preaching brought Seymour under conviction and persuaded him of the third work of the baptism of the Holy Spirit that would be evidenced by speaking in tongues, the culmination of conversion and sanctification.

  In 1906, Seymour answered a call to preach for a congregation in Los Angeles affiliated with the young Church of the Nazarene, a small holiness sect. Upon his arrival, he began teaching the tongues doctrine, the key theological innovation that distinguished Pentecostalism from its holiness antecedent. Fearing heresy, church members prevented him from reentering the church. Seymour took a remnant from the congregation to a series of services he led first in a member’s house, and then to a tumbledown building in south central Los Angeles. Using some packing cases as his pulpit, Seymour preached quietly but earnestly for a handful of listeners. “The devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal,” wrote a Los Angeles Times reporter at the scene. “Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshipers, who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication.”

  After Seymour’s reception of the Spirit in April 1906, the movement grew quickly. Seymour’s revivals attracted a motley crowd of whites, blacks, Mexicans, Europeans, and Asians. The elaborate homemade network of the Holiness/Pentecostal press helped to further the excitement that “the fire spreads,” to use their favorite descriptive metaphor. Seymour established the Apostolic Faith to publicize the awakening. Some 50,000 copies of the paper circulated nationally. An early white participant and the revival’s most meticulous recorder, William Bartleman, wrote that “Brother Seymour was recognized as the nominal leader in charge. But we had no Pope or Hierarchy. We were brethren.”

  Seymour attempted to restrain emotions by preaching low-key sermons and insisting on the priority of salvation first over more apparently spectacular demonstrations of spiritual power. He saw the movement of God’s spirit as validated first by the evidence of love in the believer. Tongues speech was not the only or even the most important signifier of a true faith. Despite these attempts at deliberate self-control, early participants remembered Azusa as a time when the Spirit broke down intellectualism and ratiocination. As one participant remembered, “and we noticed that those who were down on their knees praying, begun speaking in other tongues. And that was my first introduction in Pentecost . . . nobody trying to urge them on to something, it was just simply God opening the windows of heaven and throwing down upon them, the blessings that they themselves could not contain.” As another southern-born participant put it, “I, being southern born, thought it a miracle that I could sit in a service by a colored saint of God and worship, or eat at a great camp table and forget I was eating beside a colored saint, but in spirit and truth God was worshipped in love and harmony.”

  Seymour’s multiethnic movement valued spirit over hierarchy and empowered women, African Americans, and others in marginal status to follow the lead of the Spirit and preach the word. In that sense, Pentecostalism was a spiritual movement which, in its actual early practice, worked against racism and segregation in churches. The interracial nature of Pentecostalism historically has undermined racist practices in Christian churches, not so much intentionally as by the presence of people together seeking the spirit. As was the case with other evangelical movements earlier in history, the eventual institutionalization of churches to carry on the work tended to put in place the kinds of hierarchies (including racial ones) that the religious revolutions had originally moved to combat. Nonetheless, Pentecostalism today remains a massive international phenomenon, with tens of millions of adherents in the “Global South” (Latin America and Africa in particular), and with a religious message that values the action of the spirit foremost. In some cases, moreover, Pentecostal ministers directly confronted racist exercises of power. In Washington, D.C., the leader of one large black Pentecostal congregation held a celebratory “wake” upon the death of Theodore Bilbo, who was a longtime Senator from the state of Mississippi and one of the most egregious racists ever to serve in Congress.

  In the early years of southern holiness and Pentecostalism, from the 1880s to the 1920s, dozens of independent evangelists, musical itinerants, and faith healers combed the South. White and black evangelicals joined the new movement, opening up new sanctified churches and denominations. Over time the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) emerged as by far the most influential expression of black Pentecostalism.

  It sprang from the work of the evangelist and organizer Charles Harrison Mason (1866–1961). Born to parents who had been slaves, Mason grew up intending to be a minister. “It seemed that God endowed him with supernatural characteristics,” his daughter wrote, “which were manifested in dreams and visions that followed him through life.” In the early 1900s, Mason walked from town to town in the Mississippi Delta, spreading holiness teachings. Yet he was not satisfied with the second blessing of sanctification. Like other early Pentecostals, he sought a yet more
profound spiritual experience. He found it at the Azusa Street revival, where he received the third blessing at the hands of William J. Seymour. During a night of prayer, Mason saw a vision. Upon awaking, he cried out for the culmination of the work of sanctification. Soon he felt himself levitated from his seat. “There came a wave of glory into me,” as he described it, “and all of my being was filled with the glory of the Lord. So when He had gotten me straight on my feet there came a light which enveloped my entire being above the brightness of the Sun. When I opened my mouth to say glory, a flame touched my tongue which ran down in me. My language changed and no word could I speak in my own tongue.” Upon returning home, he felt that the “Spirit had taken full control of me and everything was new to me. I soon found out the Lord was teaching me and giving me new songs. I asked Him to give me the interpretation of what was spoken in tongues for I did not understand the operation of the spirit.” He soon found himself bursting with “all kinds of spiritual utterances.”

  Early Pentecostals recognized Mason’s special powers of discernment. And Mason’s preaching skill garnered considerable attention. As he proudly recounted his early career, the Holy Spirit through him “saved, sanctified and baptized thousands of souls of all colors and races.” Mason enticed crowds of whites and blacks to see him in action. In Nashville in 1916, for example, he attracted a sizable audience to a city auditorium. “Many of the best white people of the city attended the meeting,” Mason claimed. “The Holy Spirit through me did many wonderful things.” A series of services in Little Rock in 1919 produced the same effect, as “God so wonderfully wrought His power among both white and black, sanctifying, baptizing, and healing.” In 1933, the church’s newspaper, The Whole Truth, reported that “both white and colored testified of the wonderful healing power of God” at the COGIC annual convention in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.