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Epilogue: From Black Christian Nationalism to Civil Rights
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EPILOGUE FROM BLACK CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM TO CIVIL RIGHTS In December 1935 the Social Clubs Union withdrew from Savannah’s Emancipation Association, the organization that for years had been dominated by the clergy and had taken charge of planning the parade and celebration marking the end of slavery. “Like a lightening bolt from a clear sky,” read a front-page report in the Savannah Tribune, the association “struck a snarling rock.” R. B. Howard, a spokesman for the union, explained: “the clergy refuses to allow us to have any part in naming a speaker and drawing up the program.” Moreover, he said, they “refused to consider any man as eligible for the first of January speaker unless he is a member of one or the other of two denominations that have the largest membership among our group in the city,” meaning the Baptists and the Methodists.1 In a display of public unity, one parade was planned for the 1936 celebration , which was to commence, as usual, from West Broad and Gwinnett streets, before branching off into two separate ceremonies. Those who favored tradition could attend the clergy’s “literary exercises” that were planned for Saint Philip A.M.E. Church. The more secular Social Clubs Union retreated to Butler Presbyterian. Notwithstanding Howard’s grievance with Savannah’s clergy, keynote speakers at both observances came from one of the 185 elite mainline black Baptist churches: Rev. L. M. Terrell, who had recently assumed the pulpit at First Bryan Baptist, gave the address at Saint Philip, and Ivory W. Collins, pastor of Second Baptist, spoke to those assembled at Butler Presbyterian. Nothing so clearly illustrates the shifting relationship between the sacred and the secular than this split. As the program organized by the Social Clubs Union shows, the secularization of black Savannah ought not be interpreted as a banning of religion. It was more about tolerance and choice and liberty to choose who made the rules, who governed, and how. What it really refers to is a universal proposition of modernity—a separation of church and state. The divergent celebrations suggest that the split between the two factions was over the broader meaning of freedom; each celebration expressed a distinct view of black leadership and black activism. The celebration sponsored by the clergy was short and to the point. It included a reading from the Scriptures , a singing of the “National Negro Anthem,” a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, and Terrell’s “principle address.” The remembrance at Butler Presbyterian, while not devoid of religion, was less insular and included speeches by attorney T. J. Hopkins, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and J. G. Lemon, also an attorney, who delivered an address entitled “The New Deal.” The singing of “America” was on the program just before the “Negro National Anthem,” a poignant expression of the tightrope black southerners walked between two nations, one still off-limits and the other not quite free.2 If Savannah ’s “pre-modern” sacred social order could be characterized as insular with a strong measure of interclass Christian fellowship and a focus on racial uplift as the ticket to freedom, the emerging newer order was less constrained and blinkered, more political, and even embraced the individualism, however cautiously, that characterizes liberal bourgeois societies. The story of black Baptists in Savannah—and black evangelical Christianity more generally—from the end of the Civil War until the eve of World War II depicts not only a growing secularization, but also the weakening of Black Christian Nationalism. In 1928 the city’s most powerful black-owned institution, the Wage Earners Savings Bank, failed, and with it went some of the certainty about the transformative and even redemptive powers of business . This was not the city’s first black bank to fail. Fourteen months earlier the Mechanics Savings Bank bit the dust. But this failure was worse. The Wage Earners had seemed indestructible; its borrowers and depositors were as far away as New York City. The Crisis magazine once called it the most important black-owned bank in the country. The collapse of the Wage Earners led black Savannah into a spiritual crisis, and so it was fitting that Savannah’s 186 Epilogue [3.94.150.98] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:06 GMT) Interdenominational Ministers Union was the first to respond. Within days of the bank’s collapse the ministers organized a “memorial to our people.” At a second gathering...