Max Yergan
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Max Yergan

Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior

David Henry Anthony, III

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eBook - ePub

Max Yergan

Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior

David Henry Anthony, III

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In his long and fascinating life, black activist and intellectual Max Yergan (1892-1975) traveled on more ground—both literally and figuratively—than any of his impressive contemporaries, which included Adam Clayton Powell, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and A. Phillip Randolph. Yergan rose through the ranks of the "colored" work department of the YMCA, and was among the first black YMCA missionaries in South Africa. His exposure to the brutality of colonial white rule in South Africa caused him to veer away from mainstream, liberal civil rights organizations, and, by the mid-1930s, into the orbit of the Communist Party. A mere decade later, Cold War hysteria and intimidation pushed Yergan away from progressive politics and increasingly toward conservatism. In his later years he even became an apologist for apartheid.

Drawing on personal interviews and extensive archival research, David H. Anthony has written much more than a biography of this enigmatic leader. In following the winding road of Yergan’s life, Anthony offers a tour through the complex and interrelated political and institutional movements that have shaped the history of the black world from the United States to South Africa.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2006
ISBN
9780814705339

1

Beginnings

Boyhood, Baptists, Bangalore
At the dawning of the twentieth century, Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois correctly anticipated that the supreme challenge of the century would be “the problem of the color line.” From the vantage point of many Americans of African descent his words rang resonantly, fueling divergent ideas and actions, regional, national, and supranational in scope. For one, Max Yergan, the more relevant of these contending currents of opinion would be African Redemption, accommodationism, Pan-Negroism, Pan-Africanism, and the burgeoning movement for world socialism. A product of an era, indeed a millennium, of transformation, he stood as heir to these traditions, his life a mix of them.
In a beautiful but race-conscious Raleigh, North Carolina, in a handsome old house at 210 East Cabarrus Street, built by his grandfather Frederick Yeargan (also spelled Yeargin or Yergin), Mack Yergan was born on Tuesday, July 19, 1892, to Frederick’s elder daughter, Lizzie. In time, “Mack” became “Max” and, late in life, the bearer would aver, somewhat grandiloquently, that his given appellation had originally been Maximilian, recalling a name used by several Holy Roman emperors, but little additional documentary evidence verifies this impressive-sounding assertion.1 Max’s mother (born June 1873) and her sister Eliza lived with their widower father, and both were mothers with a number of children by the century’s turning (Lizzie had borne five by 1900), making Frederick a grandfather and patriarch of an extended family.
Fred Yeargan was a pillar of the Black community of Raleigh. A carpenter born in slavery in 1838, he actively supported the Baptist church, in which he wielded considerable influence, as well as occupying a seat on the Board of Trustees of Shaw Institute, later Shaw University, the subsequent alma mater of grandson Max. Well before his birth, then, young Mack was poised to inherit a significant portion of the nineteenth-century legacy of Christian-inspired education and the mission to “uplift” dark folk that proved personally and socially vital in the fin de siùcle era.
Little has surfaced on Max Yergan’s father. His name is absent from Yergan’s birth certificate, and nothing yet proves that he cohabited with Lizzie Yeargan at the time their boy was born. Yergan may have deliberately avoided referring to him for personal reasons. We cannot be certain of his name, for the birth record lists “unknown” in the designated space, but the handwritten words “Ed Price,” possibly added at a later date, replace a stricken initial entry. Anecdotal evidence hints that Max knew precisely who sired him, a man of mixed Native and Black heritage, and that little love was lost between them.2
As to the Yergans’ social context, eight years before the grand drape descended upon the nineteenth century, upwardly mobile brown-skinned Raleighians had an oasis in a desert of doubt, denial, devastation, and degradation. Formal segregation still had not reached them as it had so many of their African-American relatives across the Southland. Near Shaw University, as Jonathan Daniels, White elite editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, reports, “all around our house Negroes and questionable white people came more and more to live.”3 Daniels suggests the tone of the neighborhood of Shaw:
At least one of Booker T. Washington’s sons went to college there. And next door to us lived Wesley Hoover, as dignified an Anglo-Saxon gentleman, for all the little Negro blood in him, as I ever saw.
 But Wesley Hoover had made his money, a great deal for a Negro in Raleigh in those days, running a saloon. That was an occupation which we understood was a special service rendered in assistance to the Devil. Yet he was a good neighbor and man. The South was not entirely simple, even then. But from us and from the Hoovers and from Shaw, the neighborhood fell off precipitately.4
But the neighborliness that Daniels’s narrative suggests obscures some of the harder-edged realities of Negro Raleigh. The News and Observer was in Jon Daniels’s youth edited by his unrepentantly Negro-phobic, segregationist father, Josephus, later a valued cabinet official in several presidential administrations. Its pages did not then announce the birth of Negro children but regularly served up lurid tales of bestial Black criminals getting their just deserts. One story about a lynched Mississippi rapist was headlined “FOOD FOR VULTURES.” An interracial clash “culminating in bloodshed—9 Negroes and 2 White men reported killed,” topped by a vengeful bout of “whitecapping,” was headlined “A Race War in Arkansas.”5 And “He Got His Dues: A Camden County Fiend Hanged and Riddled: A Negro Brute Who Makes a Horrible Assault Is Visited with Retribution” headlined the story of how one Joe Barco, accused of the murder of Mrs. Frank Sanderlin with a hoe following a sexual assault, was dragged from his jail cell by a mob of five to six hundred men, emasculated, mutilated, hanged, and riddled by what a reporter took to be a thousand bullets fired into his “suspended carcass.”6
The genteel nostalgia of Daniels’s reverie and the brutish reportage of the lynchings each speak eloquently about Raleigh. It was a place of civilized pretensions of every sort, yet tempered by a baser element of strict, retributive, racialistic comeuppance. This was rooted in a fierce fire-and-brimstone moralism, the kind that kept kids in Sunday school but also gave impetus to corporal and capital punishment, vigilantism, and the fearsome Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, the more positive benefits of religion were manifested by the Yankee Republican missionaries who traveled south from New England to uplift those benighted millions who had endured the base travails of bondage in the land of liberty. Max remembered one such bearer of the sacred word, Mary Phillips, a teacher at St. Ambrose Episcopal Parish School.7 With his memories of a strict upbringing at the hands of a firm but nurturing mother and a benevolently despotic grandfather, Yergan testified to having matured in an orderly environment, tightly bound by an ethos of piety, duty, and respect, all practiced in a rigidly evangelical Christian framework that often touted “old-time religion.”8
An aspect of that framework was orientation to Africa. Max later reminisced that his grandfather had told him, on his deathbed, that it was his fervent wish that one day one of his grandsons would go as a missionary to “our people in Africa.”9 This injunction would become Yergan’s raison d’ĂȘtre, both symbolically and literally. And the elder man’s desire was by no means unusual in African-American communities during the 1890s. This was a time of great interest in Africa, especially among literate people of African descent, and in the notion of a divinely inspired mandate for “African Redemption” (a concept connecting certain Black and sympathetic White Christians). It found expression in “Ethiopianist” churches and back-to-Africa movements in predominantly Black localities throughout the far-flung African diaspora of the New World. Especially keen was the linkage between Africa and Christian mission, a pathway created by generations of Black Protestants, principally Baptists, Presbyterians, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zionist (AMEZ) churches. Yeargan, a Baptist, is said to have regularly discussed Africa with at least one of his closest friends and was associated with a scholarly endeavor that held deep and abiding concern for his natal continent’s transformation, Baptist-run Shaw University.
In this regard, Yeargan was one of a select but not insignificant set of African-derived, Christian-inspired seekers of racial salvation. In the brutal post–Reconstruction era South, in order to endure in an epoch of heightened racial repression, choices seemed stark: migration or prostration. Those electing not to leave their localities often deemed it desirable to conciliate reactionary White “redeemers.” Precisely these circumstances made possible the ascendance of Booker T. Washington, the key Black figure from 1895 to 1915.
In a landmark speech on September 18, 1895, at the opening ceremonies for Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition, Tuskegee Institute principal Washington lamented to a receptive, racially mixed audience that through ignorance and inexperience the post-Reconstruction African-American had begun focusing exclusively on the top professions, neglecting industrialism and manual labor. He urged these Black masses to “cast down your bucket where you are,” i.e., to acknowledge the existence of an “identity of interests” linking Black and White southerners beyond race and to accept the inestimable value of human effort as the engine of socioeconomic advance.
For Washington race advancement was forthcoming only through hard work, dedication, and patience. In his early years, Max Yergan subscribed to that belief. Implicit and frequently explicit was the principal’s scorn for social protest as a vehicle through which to pursue racial uplift. This scorn made Washington’s policy of accommodating Redemption seem to be a capitulation to the resurgence of White supremacy. In Atlanta Washington phrased his anti-protest stance in chastening terms:
The wisest of my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long, in any degree, ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.10
In the short run, Washington’s nationally reported Atlanta address appeared to promise all things to all audiences. Southern Whites tended to treat it as acceptance that Blacks would no longer threaten their reassumption of political and racial suzerainty. Well-heeled northern Whites, including some socially minded robber-baron benefactors, reacted to accommodation as a rise in industrious Black self-reliance meriting moral and material aid. Northern African-Americans saw accommodation as inspiring them to continue struggling. But to African-Americans who remained in the South the Atlanta speech confirmed that constant effort, forbearance, and initiative were the requirements of the new age. Nowhere would this need become more apparent than among those African-Americans striving to secure an education. Yet there was another element evident in Washington’s philosophy and in the minds of each literate woman, man, and child of African descent who confronted the challenges of the latter 1800s. This was the position of Africa in the world and of their own conflicted connection as cultural castaways.
Since their arrival on these shores, countless generations of Africa’s daughters and sons had grappled with the questions that their tragic transportation across the Atlantic had presented them with, maybe never as harshly as in the nineteenth century. Prior to 1808, the fate of America’s minions seemed more or less academic, as slavery’s power promised to persist forever. With a formal end to the legal Atlantic slave trade, however, the issue of what role the Africans were to play in New World society in general and in North America in particular returned to frighten the framers of a Constitution countenancing slavery. Many of these men, including the ostensibly most enlightened, from Washington and Jefferson in the Revolutionary and early republican eras right down to the “Great Emancipator” Lincoln, proved incapable of conceiving of a United States where Blacks, ceasing to be chattel, could cohabit freely alongside Caucasians.
Most presidential office holders and the rank and file who looked to them for leadership saw Africans as useful in slavery but outlandish and unassimilable in any other status in America. Their prescription was to return these misbegotten souls to the continent of their ancestors, through deportation. African repatriation was to be accomplished by the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816. In spite of growing evidence that this entity had been organized primarily to safeguard proslavery forces from myriad perceived threats posed by the free Negro group by repatriating them to Africa (thereby reducing the likelihood of their sparking slave rebellions, either actively or by example), wary free people of color and a few kindred White advocates sometimes genuinely saw emigration as a viable alternative to the restrictions leveled specifically against free Negroes across the nation. Reverend William Meade, an ACS agent, started a Raleigh branch of the nascent association in June 1819.11 However, African-American ardor for African colonization waxed and waned, and though interest in Liberian emigration dropped off during the Civil War years, it reappeared to some degree in the aftermath of Reconstruction, in 1877. In that year a series of mass meetings was held in Durham, Concord, and Raleigh, for the purpose of garnering support for African colonization. The fact that only 318 African-Americans quit North Carolina for Liberia under ACS auspices in 1876 and 1894 suggests a lack of enthusiasm for the African alternative.12
Never entirely eliminated by the nineteenth century’s close, African Redemption resurfaced for one group of Black Christians. Aged supporters of African Redemption such as Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, and even Martin Delany had looked to Africa as a potential refuge for embattled New World Negroes anxious to share the Bible’s bounties and aid in Africa’s ascent. By midcentury Ethiopianism and African Redemption had entered the lexicon of mission societies and had reached Christians of every color, including the Baptists who bankrolled Shaw University. Moreover, as foreign invaders more actively intervened in Africa and African lives, a dialogue began among people of African descent concerning the roots of crises then afflicting Africa’s ancestral homelands. Imbued with the spirit of the times, some of the elect became persuaded that the responsibility for this situation lay not so much in the designs and activities of European imperialists as in the purported spiritual poverty of Africans themselves, in their allegedly unbridled ways. The antidote for this condition would be evangelization—to “uplift” a bedeviled, prostrate Africa, “benighted” and rent asunder by primitive superstition and heathen ignorance.13
Support for the idea of emigration to Africa in the final quarter of the nineteenth century was especially strong within the African Methodist Episcopal Church, shepherded by charismatic and uncompromising Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who will be discussed in a later chapter.
Besides the AME congregants, the Negro Baptist Foreign Mission Board placed special emphasis upon Africa and should be seen as an independent force advocating at least temporary emigration with a fervor nearly identical to that motivating Turner and his AME disciples. Baptists galvanized other Black Christians into action, and one of them must have been Frederick Yeargan.
It is well known that the Black church played an important role in both accommodation and amelioration, and education did the same. Frederick Yeargan made a point of informing the enumerator who took the 1900 census that he and his daughters were literate. This would suggest the value he placed on reading and writing. For nineteenth century Americans literacy was often synonymous with schooling, even if one was self-educated, a fact with particular significance for the ex-slave population. This association has a special meaning in light of the role education played in the life of Yeargan’s grandson, Max.
Yeargan’s self-estimate may well have included reflection of the view, prevalent among both Blacks and Whites, that servitude in North Carolina was milder than elsewhere in the Cotton Kingdom, which led to the paradoxical notion of a “slave aristocracy,” which notion was generated in one of the exceptions to the state’s rural norm, Raleigh. The myth avers that North Carolina was “good” to “its Blacks,” especially for skilled slave artisans like Frederick Yeargan, who were understood as having formed an aristocracy within their class on the basis of their greater marketability and relatively privileged status.
While Raleigh’s Wake County was not a key point of production in the plantation economy, it was not immune from reliance upon slave labor. Before the Civil War, scores of slaves had been manumitted, some, like Julius Melbourn, becoming quite wealthy. And degree of education was probably important for a sense of membership in this aristocracy.
Education was one of the principal vehicles for “uplift” in the American South, especially for those African-Americans afforded the rare opportunity of advancing to the college level. Many drew connections between religion and education as practically and morally significant, as was explicitly emphasized throughout the nineteenth century by both literate slaves and free men and women, on the one hand, and, on the other, legions of northern-educated, mainly White missionaries who went South to spread the gospel and sanctify the...

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