Black Women’s Christian Activism

Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb

Betty Livingston Adams

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781479814817, 9780814745465
• eBook ISBN: 9781479887354
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

2017 Wilbur Non-Fiction Award Recipient

Winner of the 2018 Author's Award in scholarly non-fiction, presented by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance

Winner, 2020 Kornitzer Book Prize, given by Drew University


Examines the oft overlooked role of non-elite black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth century

When a domestic servant named Violet Johnson moved to the affluent white suburb of Summit, New Jersey in 1897, she became one of just barely a hundred black residents in the town of six thousand. In this avowedly liberal Protestant community, the very definition of "the suburbs" depended on observance of unmarked and fluctuating race and class barriers. But Johnson did not intend to accept the status quo. Establishing a Baptist church a year later, a seemingly moderate act that would have implications far beyond weekly worship, Johnson challenged assumptions of gender and race, advocating for a politics of civic righteousness that would grant African Americans an equal place in a Christian nation. Johnson's story is powerful, but she was just one among the many working-class activists integral to the budding days of the civil rights movement.

Focusing on the strategies and organizational models church women employed in the fight for social justice, Adams tracks the intersections of politics and religion, race and gender, and place and space in a New York City suburb, a local example that offers new insights on northern racial oppression and civil rights protest. As this book makes clear, religion made a key difference in the lives and activism of ordinary black women who lived, worked, and worshiped on the margin during this tumultuous time.

1

“Please Allow Me Space”

Race and Faith in the Suburbs

When twenty-seven-year-old Violet Johnson arrived in Summit, New Jersey, in 1897 it was an area in transition, undergoing a redefinition of space and place. In some respects, the same could be said of Johnson herself. Among the first generation of freeborn African Americans, Johnson had witnessed many transformations and re-creations. Born in 1870 in Wilmington, North Carolina, she moved North and found employment as a domestic servant in Brooklyn, New York, with the John Eggers family. When the Eggers joined other white middle-class families moving to New Jersey’s emerging suburbs, Johnson moved with them and shared household space and duties with two other servants, an African American woman from Virginia and an immigrant man from Sweden.1

In the 1890s Summit’s African American population numbered a little over one hundred out of a total population of over five thousand. Only three nuclear families could be counted among the black residents, and none owned real property.2 Predominantly single women and men employed at the residential hotels and without familial or social ties, few remained in Summit beyond the summer season. Those who did worked as maids, housekeepers, gardeners, or coachmen in private residences.

Life among a white middle class in the process of solidifying its economic and cultural space offered employment but few amenities for those in the service sector. Domestic workers shared intimate space with white employers who expected them to remain virtually invisible. The YMCA, woman’s literary society, Town Improvement Association, churches, and other organizations existed for the pleasure of the white elite, not the hired help. For black suburban workers, most of whom had lived in urban centers in the South or North, the New Jersey suburbs seemed stark and isolated compared to the communities they had left behind. African Americans had either to create their own community or spend precious leisure hours traveling by train and ferry to Newark, Brooklyn, or Manhattan.

Shortly after her arrival in Summit, Violet Johnson organized a Christian Endeavour Society Bible study group. The international, interracial, and intergender evangelical Protestant organization, begun in Maine in 1881 with the motto “For Christ and the Church,” emphasized fellowship and service. Members prayed and read the Bible daily, committed to a time of private devotion and Christian service, and attended regular consecration meetings that reinforced spiritual commitment and fellowship.3 In contrast to the Endeavor Society organized in 1881 at Summit’s white Methodist Episcopal Church, Johnson’s nondenominational group appealed to the young African American women and men on the social and economic margins with no public or private space of their own. Johnson paid the first month’s rent on a meeting place and converted a commercial laundry into temporary sacred space.4

Evidently the Endeavor Society met a need among the suburb’s black workers, for within six months they organized a mission “where all Christians regardless of denomination might gather and worship.” They engaged a local cook and ordained Baptist minister as their spiritual advisor and affiliated with Mount Zion Baptist Church, an African American congregation in Newark, nearly an hour’s ride on the Sunday train.5

Despite the challenge of finding space and the financial strain of rent and the minister’s salary, within a year Johnson’s interdenominational mission was “set apart as a regular Baptist Church,” a public declaration that African Americans were committed to sustaining an independent institution in suburban space. In June 1898 Reverend William Thomas Dixon of Brooklyn, Violet Johnson’s former pastor and Corresponding Secretary of the New England Baptist Missionary Convention (NEBMC), headed a church council that formally recognized Fountain Baptist Church and its eight members, all domestic servants. The church’s organization preceded the suburb’s incorporation by a year.6

Establishing an official Baptist church signaled a change in expectations. Previously black domestic workers had been scattered about the suburb in boarding houses, rented rooms, or staff quarters, often invisible in public space. Now within a year of Violet Johnson’s arrival, they had become a visible community, sharing a commitment to institutional independence and to each other.

The newly formed congregation joined other religious groups, including German Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Northern Baptists as well as a recently organized Swedish Evangelical Lutheran mission of “about thirty Swedes, Danes, and Scandinavians,” and a Roman Catholic Church with separate services for Italian, Irish, and English parishioners.7 Within the first few months the newly organized Baptist congregation established a building fund for a permanent house of worship.

Organizing an independent congregation was a commitment; erecting a permanent church building would be a sacrifice. A pastor’s salary, rent for worship space, and contributions to a building fund amounted to a considerable undertaking for workers whose long hours and endless tasks were rewarded with meager pay.8 Moreover, a building fund represented faith in the long-term presence of African Americans in the suburb. For as many recognized, given their tenuous ties to Summit the odds were against their remaining long enough to see a completed building. The suburb was not the first stop on the journey from their native Virginia or North Carolina; for many, it would not be the last. Gardeners, cooks, chauffeurs, and maids followed the work—from Saratoga in upstate New York to the Jersey shore.9 They were subject to dismissal at will, or, like Violet Johnson, could relocate with their employer. Still others found the isolation from family and friends unbearable and moved to more congenial places.

The decision by a young black woman on the suburban frontier to organize an independent church was as much a political as a religious one.10 The same year that Violet Johnson arrived in Summit, for example, domestic workers Edward and Ana Schuyler moved from New York City with their daughters and son. Ana, a member of a prominent black church in the city, was “unanimously received into the fellowship” of Summit’s First Baptist Church, organized in 1867 along denominational rather than racial, national, or linguistic lines. In 1902 the white congregation accepted as candidates for baptism Ana’s daughter and a black laborer who had moved to Summit three years earlier. Another Schuyler daughter was baptized at First Baptist in 1906.11 In the late nineteenth century African American Protestants in the North had options.

Although First Baptist welcomed all Baptists regardless of color, Johnson chose to participate in the programmatic plan of African Americans to create a denomination and construct a race suited to the demands of industrialized and urbanized America. In the wake of Southern disenfranchisement in the 1890s, black northern Baptists positioned the church as a bulwark against the forces of white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation. Thus, northern African Americans saw themselves as fighting a “southern problem,” and their remedies varied from those of southern blacks. They appealed to the common sense of white northerners and their longstanding relations and pointed to pious church women who were abused in public space. They viewed local congregations led by seminary-trained men as a Christian training ground and a school for American citizenship. Independent churches would provide material evidence of black men’s ability to manage their own institutions and affirm their fitness for the franchise.

Independent churches also positioned African American women as active agents in that religious and political process. Despite their centrality to the expansion of northern churches, Baptist ministers viewed black working women’s presence with ambivalence, even as their number increased with the migration of middle-class white families to the suburbs. Violet Johnson would have to fight for a woman’s place in the church she had founded and that church’s space in the suburb.

Creating a Denomination, Constructing a Race

Following the Civil War, African American Baptists in the North began to organize separate congregations led by black ministers.12 With a theology grounded in New Testament scripture and the optimism born of the Civil War and Emancipation, black ministers envisioned a multiracial, egalitarian society and themselves as equal agents with their white brothers, with “one . . . Master . . . and all . . . brethren.”13 America could become the reified New Testament church with neither slave nor free, but all equal before God and under the Constitution. They had only to provide the leadership and thereby prove themselves and the race worthy of God’s blessing and American citizenship.

Educated and trained in American Baptist Home Missionary Society (ABHMS) colleges and seminaries, northern black clergy soon chafed under the “proscription” of “Anglo-Saxon auspices” and resented being treated as “wards.”14 In 1874 black Baptists organized the New England Baptist Missionary Convention (NEBMC) as an independent association with a territorial reach from Maine to Virginia. With the objective to “propagate the Gospel of Christ, and to advance the interest of his kingdom, by supplying vacant churches . . . sending ministers into destitute regions . . . and by planting and building up churches,” black Baptists announced their readiness to control their own ecclesiastical affairs, especially the ordination of ministers.15

Based upon the theory of natural and divine rights and a linear reading of church and American history, NEBMC ministers claimed dual citizenship as “American citizens” and “citizens of the Kingdom of God” and designated the church as the primary institution for teaching both Christian principles and ideals of citizenship.16 Pastors were to use “their high and God-given privilege and right to train the church along all practical lines, how to . . . vote intelligently . . . and be powerful and effective in the national life, for the good and well-being of our race.^”17

In an era when Christianized was synonymous with civilized, NEBMC annual sessions were part spiritual revival and part political forum. Aware of the imperial gaze of Anglo-Saxons who deigned to evaluate their development and rule on their fitness for citizenship, convention leaders believed it was their Christian duty to provide direction on political matters. “[W]hile this is an ecclesiastical, rather than a political, a religious, and not a secular body,” NEBMC declared, “it is nevertheless in the line of duty for us to take cognizance of and give timely expression in relations to matters that effect [sic] us as a class of citizens, in our social and political relation, to our great body politic.”18 Religion and politics were intertwined.

In the wake of the evisceration of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the racial violence in the South in the 1880s, NEBMC ministers critiqued American politics in their sermons. They lauded the Constitution with the War Amendments as the highest achievement in human government and denounced white supremacy as the “demon of caste prejudice” that sanctioned the robbery and assassination of African Americans “without effectual protest of either church or state.”19 Yet, because most of the segregation in the North was customary and flexible to a greater degree than in the South, they believed that these racial proscriptions would wither.

Thus, northern black Baptists denounced the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson U. S. Supreme Court ruling as a “mischievous law.” In a statement that reflected their past hopes more than their coming experience, NEBMC clergymen argued that Plessy, though promulgated as a ruling against a race, was a class-based ruling on individual and group advancement. In language that appears mild in light of Plessy’s pernicious effect, the denomination disavowed any desire for preferential treatment and sought only to “warn the common people” of the “seriously injurious” discriminatory laws “perpetrated upon it by a pampered aristocracy . . . raised to positions of trust and honor by the franchise of the masses.”20

As Plessy became established law, northern black Baptists drew a direct line between the “lawless factions” in the South and American imperialism. The great “sociological problem” threatening the republic and civilization was not “the Negro,” but the “imperialism” of Republican President William McKinley’s administration.21 From efforts to nullify the Fifteenth Amendment in the South, to the war in the Philippines, the Boer War in South Africa, and the Boxer Rebellion in China, the tidal wave of white supremacy fueled violence and transgressed divine law. In a resolution distributed to the press black Baptists declared, “God made of one blood all nations . . . . We do recognize individual superiority, but we do not recognize race superiority.”22

As “enemies” of the race “Southernize[d] the North” and the federal government acquiesced in the “nationalism of Jim Crow,” black ministers noted “with alarm the increasing and wide-spread encroachment upon the civil and political rights of our people in this country.”23 The bill of indictment included the drift of northern capital south, Jim Crow cars in interstate travel, disenfranchisement in the South, and the “strange and studied silence” of white northern ministers.24 By 1905 northern black Baptists felt compelled to address the white supremacy sexual charge of social equality. “As it is commonly asserted that we are seeking social equality, thus placing us in a false light before the people of races in this country,” the convention declared, “we emphasize the fact that it is not social equality we seek, but that we demand the rights of equal opportunity to pursue every occupation that will make life desirable.”25 Men and women carried the message to cities and suburbs in sermons and convention repo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Please Allow Me Space”: Race and Faith in the Suburbs
• 2. “A Great Work for God and Humanity”: African American Christian Women and Organized Social Reform
• 3. “The Home Away from Home”: Suffrage, War, and Civic Righteousness
• 4. “Unholy and Unchristian Attitude”: Interracial Dialogue in Segregated Spaces, 1920–1937
• 5. “Putting Real American Ideals in American Life”: Church Women and Electoral Politics
• 6. “Carthage Must Be Destroyed”: Health, Housing, and the New Deal
• Conclusion: “You Just as Well Die with the Ague as with the Fever”
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author