Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century

CHAPTER FIVE: Conflict and Community

c h a p t e r 5 Conflict and Community Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth; and he said Sibboleth; for he could not frame to pronounce it right: then they laid hold on him, and slew him at the fords of Jordan. And there fell at that time of Ephraim forty and two thousand. Judges 12:6 (ASV) There seemed to be no such thing as a straight line for white missionaries or for black and Chinese mission participants. Mission theorists, officials , and advocates posited a linear equation to describe the progression from “heathen” to Christian American—merely add a mission education and inspire conversion. Black southerners certainly desired the shortest possible path from slavery to freedom, from freedom to equality; and Chinese—whether sojourner or settler—most assuredly hoped for the most direct route to Gold Mountain and all that it represented. A cursory examination of official ABHMS records might indeed suggest a steady and upward trajectory of progress. The Raleigh mission had established Second Baptist Church early on, and, in 1875, the Society, missionary Henry Martin Tupper, and other supporters helped solidify the educational project by incorporating Shaw University. And the Chinese Mission School in Portland had, by 1877, achieved firm enough footing for the Executive Board of the American Baptist Home Mission Society to commit resources to the local project while supplementing missionary Dong Gong’s salary so he could Conflict and Community 133 serve as the Society’s designated evangelist not just in Portland but for Chinese throughout Oregon and Washington Territory. Yet a closer look at the extant evidence reveals a less constant movement. Missionaries, blacks, and Chinese—each group found the path they traveled, whether to salvation or to freedom or to security or to all three, bedeviled by discord. In fact, Baptist projects in Raleigh and Portland faced serious obstacles that threatened their existence and challenged the definition of missionbased communities. Home missions may have been arenas where participants could come together in fellowship and congregation, but conflict framed these sites. On one level, the Raleigh mission and the Portland school were objects of controversy among local blacks and Chinese in their respective cities. In Raleigh, the initial challenge presented by the refusal of black congregants at First Baptist Church to follow white missionary Henry Martin Tupper’s lead to form an all-black congregation was succeeded by a series of convoluted legal actions over Tupper’s legitimacy as pastor of Second Baptist Church. Tangential to the everyday affairs of the mission school, this controversy developed over the other arm of the ABHMS project in the South—the church. In Portland , the murder of two Christian converts by fellow Chinese residents of the city cast issues of belonging into high relief. In both locales, conflicts among blacks and among Chinese helped define the contours of community, exposing questions of class as points of tension and underscoring the contested nature of identity and belonging. Black and Chinese mission participants were presenting new identities, based in part on the status that an association with educational institutions and white missionaries could bring. These new identities , while perhaps serving as a basis from which to draw community leaders, also constituted a source of conflict within the larger freedpeople and Chinese populations in Raleigh and Portland, respectively. On another level, the relationships between local whites and American Baptist institutions marked the contours of mission-rooted communities that bound missionaries and participants together. While the historical record re- flects remarkably few instances of outright action taken toward mission institutions in either Raleigh or Portland after the mid-1870s, in both cities histories of white supremacy saturated the environment and shaped every encounter between those associated with Baptist missions and local whites. But the position of the American Baptist home mission in Raleigh differed considerably from the position of the evangelical project in Portland. In particular, Henry Martin Tupper, Second Baptist Church, and Shaw University, especially in 134 chapter five the early years, had no direct relationship to Raleigh’s elite whereas Portland’s Chinese Mission School enjoyed the sponsorship and protection of that city’s leading citizens. The difference here is crucial. While Chinese in Portland were by no means immune to hostility, discrimination, and violence, the mission school’s links to local power provided an extra measure of insulation from the worst forms of anti-Chinese agitation...