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| Vernon Johns 7 Black Social GospelCHAPTER 7. BLACK SOCIAL GOSPEL Mordecai W. JohnsonMordecai Johnson was born in Paris, Tennessee, 1890, two years before VernonJohns's birth. His father, the Reverend Wyatt Johnson, had been reared inslavery in Tennessee but became a self-trained Baptist minister of a tinycongregation he had organized.Mordecai Johnson had begun his education in the preparatory department atAtlanta Baptist College, taken his bachelor's degree at the University ofChicago, studied for the ministry at Harvard and Rochester Theological Seminary,and sandwiched in two years of teaching at Morehouse College, the new namefor Atlanta Baptist (Kluger 1976:124). From 1911 to 1912, he was a professorof English at Morehouse College and from 1912-13, a professor of the SocialSciences at Morehouse College. Subsequently, he served a stint as secretaryof the Student Department of the International Committee of Young Men's ChristianAssociations. From 1917 to 1923 he was the pastor of the First Baptist Church,Charleston, West Virginia (Woodson, 1969:658). Vernon Johns took over thepastorship of the First Baptist Church of Charleston from Mordecai Johnson.In 1926, at the age of thirty-six, the somewhat despotic Johnson (Kluger1976:123-125) was appointed the first black president of the black HowardUniversity, Washington, D.C. At the turn of the century, Howard Universityhad been little more than a glorified high school. He found and fired thedeadwood. He hired and encouraged excellent, outspoken Negro scholars suchas E. Franklin Frazier in sociology, Ralph Bunche in political science, CharlesR. Drew in medicine, and John Hope Franklin and Rayford W. Logan in history.He picked Charles Houston as the dean of the law school. Houston would laterplay a key role in the NAACP legal strategy that led to the 1954 SupremeCourt decision Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. He raisedfaculty salaries and academic standards, toughened admission requirements,and insisted on a crash program to have the graduate and professional schoolsaccredited.More importantly for our tale, Mordecai Johnson asked the black theologianHoward Thurman to develop a religious program at Howard that would matchthe excellence of the school's other academic emphases.Howard ThurmanHoward Thurman (1900-1981) came from a family of very humble circumstancesin Daytona Beach, Florida (Bardolph 1959:221). He was Dean of the Chapelof Boston University and was reared by his ex-slave grandmother. After workinghis way through Morehouse College, he entered Colgate Rochester DivinitySchool.In 1925 he was ordained a Baptist minister. From 1926 to 1928 he was pastorof the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin and from 1928 to 1931 a teacherand dean of chapel at Morehouse College. He came to Howard University in1931 as professor of Christian theology and dean of Rankin Chapel.Thurman was influenced by the personalists of the theological liberalevangelicals (Smith, L 1981:21). At Rochester he was influenced by GeorgeCross, Professor of Systematic Theology. He emphasized that the basis forunderstanding the essence of spiritual life was to understand the personalityof Jesus Christ. In Jesus, the Christian found the perfect life.As a personalist, Cross argued that the key to discerning the creative flowis in the human personality. He therefore states, "the interest in personalityis the highest interest in life" (Smith, L 1981:23,25-26,98-99). Anotherman at Rochester that influenced Thurman was Henry Burke Robins, Professorof Religious Education and the History and Philosophy of Religion and Missions.Like Cross, Robins affirmed the personality as the definer of faith. In linewith the personalists, Thurman put Jesus forward as the central figure, buthe differed from the white preachers by keeping Jesus a member of thedisinherited and not just as one who ministered unto them. Jesus was a victimof oppression and Thurman brought out the striking similarity between thesocial position of Jesus in Palestine and that of the vast majority of AmericanNegroes.Still another influence was the Quaker mystic, Rufus Jones of Haverford College(Smith, L 1981:29-30). Jones was a super personalist for he emphasized thatthe heart of religious experience is mystical experience. This helped Thurmansee how spiritual power could address the conditions that oppressed him asa black man in America. One of the pieces of advise that he took from Crossand Jones was that he should not just focus on spirituality as it relatesto blacks, but spirituality as it relates to all men.Dean Thurman was one of the most popular preachers of his era, and one ofthe nation's outstanding preachers. In the tradition of the Social Gospel,Thurman proclaimed that both the mistreatment of the nation's disinheritedand the acceptance of the will to segregate are betrayals of American andChristian ideals. He called for an integrated community uniting all peoples,one free, obviously, from racism (Smith, L 1981:13,45-48,97). He insistedthat neither blacks nor whites can attain a proper sense of self and givefull expression to their potential in an environment of prejudice, segregation,and violence. Racism is inimical to the formation of the community.Thurman (Smith, L 1981:105-106&109) challenged Christians to bring theirfaith to bear on race relations and criticized the Christian Church as asupporter of limited community. He saw segregation as the result of a lossof a proper sense of self for both blacks and whites. Whites are hurt becausesegregation causes them to feel superior to blacks. The creative energy ofmany whites is diverted to defending a malevolent social structure, and theirfull potential is not realized; they do not fully experience or contributetoward community.Thurman (Smith, L 1981:101) did not consider blacks spiritually superiorto whites; they did not have an "elect" status before God. But their oppressedstatus gave them a unique perspective that the privileged did not have becausesuffering can yield spiritual insight and growth.Thurman (Smith, L 1981:118) helped develop the concept of nonviolence intoan ethic of nonviolence. This concept helped Thurman become the creativemind behind the development of a philosophy of nonviolence for the blackstruggle.Gordon Blaine HancockHancock was born in 1884 in Greenwood County, South Carolina. He matriculatedat Benedict College in his home state. He studied three years in the academyand went on to complete his A.B. in 1911 and B. D. in 1912 summa cum laude.He was ordained for the ministry in 1911, after which he became pastor ofBethlehem Baptist Church in Newberry, not far from Columbia, South Carolina.During his college days, he had been impressed by the writings and speechesof Booker T. Washington. Hancock (Gavins 1977:15) came to stress black pride,self-help, and Christian character.Hancock (Gavins 1977:17) went back to school at the age of thirty-four. Heearned another A.B. in 1919 and a B.D. in 1920, this time from Colgate Universityin Hamilton, New York. There he was inspired by discussions of the "socialgospel" of the black church.He enrolled at Harvard University in 1920 and completed his M.A. in sociologythere in 1921. He accepted a professorship at Virginia Union University inRichmond, Virginia, which began in the fall semester 1921.Hancock (Gavins 1977:27) subsequently became chairman of the Department ofHistory and Sociology. Contending that "the problem of race relations iscrucial if American democracy is to survive," He organized one of the firstcourses on the subject at any Southern school.He (Gavins 1977:28) followed the Social Gospel as applied to sociology. Hesaid the students should align themselves with liberal movements like thosepromoted by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Founded in Atlantaduring the riot crisis of 1919, the commission promoted black-white dialoguethrough a southwide network of state and local committees.The influence of the Social Gospel can also be seen in the political activityof Hancock (Gavins 1977:29-30). Although Hancock was a very mild liberalreformer, any black educator who concentrated his thinking almost entirelyon race problems was seen as unorthodox in black college circles. Hancock,overstepping the restraint which many of his colleagues preferred, enjoyedbeing an agent provocateur. He became known as a black spokesman, all thewhile opposed by his faculty colleagues.Hancock (Gavins 1977:32-33) showed his fairly conservative stances when heinadvertently told Rayford W. Logan that blacks needed more than protest.Logan verbally attacked him. Responding, Hancock said that protest mightbecome a stumbling-block if not constructive in nature. Hancock felt thatblacks must learn to tolerate overt discrimination.Hancock (Gavins 1977:33&35) preached a message of racial uplift in hissermons at Moore Street Baptist Church, located a few blocks from Union'scampus in Jackson Ward, Richmond's largest black section. He preached athis-worldly message. He would complain loudly against injustices, prejudices,oppressions, crimes and murder, etc. But again, all this was rather mild,especially compared to a Vernon Johns.White people liked Hancock (Gavins 1977:83&87) because he took such positionas opposing black-white marriages because they incited white fears. He evencame to say that although segregation is a bad thing, the consequences ofnot accepting it may be worse.Reverdy RansomRansom (Anderson 1982:21) was a black man with fair skin, reddish hair, anda face that was often as stern as a schoolmaster's. Ransom was both a ministerand one of the most radical black activists of his time. He was born in Ohioduring the Civil War.Ransom (Luker 1991:173-174) studied at Oberlin and heard the social gospelfrom the likes of Joseph Cook, John B. Gough, and Thomas De Witt Talmadge.He lost his scholarship after organizing a protest against the segregatingof black women at a separate table in the Ladies Dining Hall. Transferringto Wilberforce University, he hid his "heretical views" from conservativeblack professors. But Ransom's theological liberalism and prophetic socialmessage eventually made him the foremost black spokesman for the social gospelin his generation.Ordained in 1886, in 1896 he went to Chicago to establish the Bethel A.M.E.Church. In 1900 he founded Chicago's Institutional Church and Social Settlement(the first of the so-called urban missions). In 1904 he left for Boston afterrumors that he was going to be fired from his position.He worked his way over to New York City to be with Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.(Luker 1991:177). Powell was pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopalcongregation on West Twenty-fifth Street. Prostitution in Negro Bohemia wasone of the first problems that confronted Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., when,in 1908, he arrived in Manhattan to assume the ministry of the AbyssinianBaptist Church, which was then on Fortieth Street between Seventh and EighthAvenues. Powell launched a "gospel bombardment" in the vicinity of his church.He and Ransom led a crusade that helped clean the streets. (Anderson 1982:20)Ransom also helped develop the institutional church model (a kind of urbanmission) that then influenced the Abyssinian church built by Powell.In 1899, when news arrived of a recent lynching in the South, Ransom (Anderson1982:22) delivered an aggressive sermon at the St. John's A.M.E. Church inCleveland. He advised blacks to become skilled in the handling of dynamiteand use it when attacked, for the protection of their homes and lives. Itis hardly surprising that in 1905 Ransom was one of the progressives whojoined W. E. B. Du Bois in forming the Niagara Movement, the nucleus of theNAACP, which was founded four years latter.In 1924 he became a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, whichwas once regarded as the most racially militant of all black religiousorganizations in America. In the pulpit and on secular platforms, Ransomdisplayed the militant traditions of his church as well as the extemporaneouspower and fluency of nineteenth-century oratory.Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. (Haygood 1993:59-60) was born on a tobacco plantationin Franklin County, Virginia in 1865 to a mulatto slave named Sally Dunningwho had become pregnant by her owner, Llewellyn Powell. The very light- skinnedson was named Adam Clayton Powell. In November 1867, Sally Dunning marriedAnthony Powell, himself a former Franklin County slave. The family workedas sharecroppers during Reconstruction.In 1875 the family moved to West Virginia to work a farm near Colesburg.In 1884, while guarding a farmer's land, young Adam Clayton Powell shot atsome intruders and hit one with buckshot in the rear. The intruder was whiteand the Powells feared that Adam might be lynched. Their son fled West Virginiato Rendville, Ohio, a coal mining town. He got work in the coal mines largelybecause a strike was on and the company was hiring blacks in order to keepthe mines working.Adam soon fell into a nere-do-well lifestyle, taking on a gambler's lifestyle.Not being a good gambler, he soon found himself broke and wanting a changein his life. While brooding over what to do, he happened into a church wherea hell-fire and brimstone preacher held sway over an enchanted crowd. Thereverend invited five young men to become ministers and one of them was Adam.He studied for the ministry at Rendville Academy for three years.Beginning in 1888 he studied for the ministry at the Wayland Academy (laterVirginia Union). In 1889 he married a light-skinned black woman. After severalyears of clerical and nonclerical jobs, he became the pastor of ImmanuelBaptist Church in New Haven, Connecticut in 1893. He then studied at theYale University School of Divinity. He lectured throughout America in thespirit of Booker T. Washington, calling for the blacks to lift themselvesup. His fame grew and because of this he found himself in London at aninternational church convention. In 1904 Virginia Union conferred a doctorof divinity on him (Haygood 1993:64).In 1908 he became pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was thenlocated on West 40th between Seventh and Eighth avenues, in the red-lightdistrict of Manhattan (Haygood 1993:68). At that time the church had 1,600members and a debt of $100,000 dollars. In the same year his son, Adam ClaytonPowell, Jr., was born. Disturbed by his surroundings, Powell began to attackfrom the pulpit the various pimps, prostitutes, and gamblers that engagedin criminal mischief. Indeed, he launched what came to be referred to asa "gospel bombardment." His antics attracted the attention of the media andhis name often appeared in the papers.Powell's attention was attracted to the growing area of Manhattan known asHarlem (Haygood 1993:68). Especially catching his interest was the activityof Marcus Garvey. Soon Powell came to see Harlem as "the symbol of liberty."By 1921 the church had become solvent and had moved out of the red-lightdistrict into a $350,000 dollar Gothic structure at its present locationon 138th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. This was not an easy task however.In order to raise the money he took to the road, swinging south, in and outof small towns, preaching in churches (Haygood 1993:70).The new 2,000-seat church, constructed of New York bluestone, had windowsof stained European and American art glass. Visitors came -- foreign andlocal -- to admire this new monument, and the membership steadily grew (Hamilton1991:72). In church circles throughout America, Powell (Haygood 1993:72)became a model success story, a symbol of fortitude and perseverance.Those blacks in church circles perceived Powell (Hamilton 1991:74-75) asone who believed in the social gospel -- that the church should be involvedin ministering as much to the social and economic needs of the congregantsas to their spiritual needs. He strongly criticized his fellow black ministerswho preached a life of piety while leading a private life of promiscuity. Returnto Main Page Table of Contents Return to Home Page |
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