From AP American History (High School) to Afro-American History (Trinity University) to Black Church History (Duke Divinity School) to Doctoral Studies (Perkins School of Theology), the fact that Frederick Douglass' biography was not required was a monumental omission of the curriculum and leadership. Especially when Douglass' statements on religion, Methodists and Christian leaders are considered. I include two notable excerpts referenced below.
In August, 1832, my master attended a Methodist camp-meeting. held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both respects. It neither made him more humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it and him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest pretentions to piety. His house was a house of prayer. He prayed morning, noon, and night. He very soon distinguished himself among his brethren and was soon made a class- leader and exhorter. p. 56
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,- a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,- and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being a slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. pp. 72-3
Comment
In my classrooms, any consideration of the nature of American human enslavement based solely on race, or Blackness, was overlooked. Prior to 1865, to be Black was to be enslaved. Those born into slavery, like Douglass, had no hope of freedom. Douglass' father was a white enslaver. It paid to multiply the enslaved through Black mothers.
Most of my education stopped with a cursory mention of indentured servants and slavery of the colonial era and pre-Civil War.. With no critical exploration of the workings of human enslavement, conclusions one could draw were wrong. For example, there is no comparison between indentured servanthood and human enslavement.
Douglass suggests that the holidays were used to inebriate slaves into thinking they would forget about their hopelessness and think their lot not so bad after all. A drunken stupor was required to think the slave's life was acceptable.
There were other vast shortcomings in my formal education. The institutional racism which was established before, during and after the Civil War was rarely, if ever, explored. What about the systemic inequalities that persisted because of race? What about the violence and lynchings that were perpetrated to support that system in the Jim Crow era?**
Whether it was the major labor unions excluding blacks from membership or banks systemically denying credit and home mortgages in the north, or requiring black children to be transported in worn down vehicles many miles from town to dilapidated, rural school houses in the south, why were these things not explored in my studies? We had debates about slavery vs. abolition, but had no exploration of the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of the 1960's, why these Acts of Congress were necessary.
There is great resistance to learning of the black experience and history today, of course. State and local school boards attempt to limit or define which Black history can be taught and what should be excluded. For the most part, the outcry, or better, the backlash is about what Black history whites are most comfortable with. The resistance is hardened in our churches. Sunday morning in the U.S. remains the most segregated time of the week.
Douglass' words can be discounted by white congregations today because, after all, enslavement is dead as an institution. The challenge of most congregations of the cultural middle would be to explore why, historically, inequities exist in generational wealth and educational attainment. The Pandemic exposed inequalities on a massive scale. ***
Instead of seizing this as an historic teachable moment, the terrible dualism between material and spiritual, the corporate and individual continues to be a dominant theme in preaching and teaching. The Advent Gospel is reduced to inner, individual peace. Lent is reduced to how Jesus and I feel about my sin. Easter is all about my private, individual eternal life, not entering more fully into God's rule and realm.
*Originally published in 1845 by the Anti-Slavery Office. For pages cited, see Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Barnes and Noble,2003.
**James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, offers a rigorous analysis of the history of lynchings in Jim Crow, and their absence in the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr is still considered one of the leading social ethicists of the 20th Century.
**See How Covid Exposed Racial Disparity in all Aspects of the Health Care System, NPR, 2022.
