Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture

6 Rites of Lynching and Rights of Dance: Historic, Anthropological, and Afro-Pentecostal Perspectives on Black Manhood after 1865

| 95 6 Rites of Lynching and Rights of Dance Historic, Anthropological, and Afro-Pentecostal Perspectives on Black Manhood after 1865 Craig Scandrett-Leatherman In traditional African societies, males became men not only by biological maturation but by social intervention. In other words, men were made by the community. Men were made through ritual process, through a communal rite of passage. This rite involved three stages. First, the boys-tobecome -men were separated from the society of women and children. Second , the community of boys was subjected to an extended time of humiliation , ordeal, and instruction. Finally, the males were elevated to the status of men and reincorporated into the community with the rights and privileges of adult manhood.1 But the middle passage of African slaves severely disrupted and destroyed these rites of passage. In the Americas, African males were not socially elevated to the status of men but were kept in a perpetual state of boyhood and submission by ongoing ordeals, humiliation, and violence. From the end of the Civil War until the 1930s, the common form of violence was lynching. Violence against African Americans, from the lynchings of this earlier period through contemporary patterns of incarceration, have become the bases of segregation, suffering, economic oppression, and emasculation in many black communities.2 Rituals of lynching were, and rituals of incarceration are, dehumanizing . Though concentrated on individuals, lynchings were performed against the whole black community and were concentrated against black men to reduce their options, squelch their energy, and threaten their lives. But black people resisted dehumanization and reinvigorated their identity and lives through their own rituals. I submit that the Afro-Pentecostal tradition , as signaled and initiated by the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), developed, in part, as a black ritual system of liberation in response to the 96 | Gender and Culture white ritual system of lynching. More particularly, I contend that Afro-Pentecostal dance was (and is) an expression of life that resists the dehumanizing effects of violence. In this chapter we review the history and rituals of an Afro-Pentecostal leader (and his denomination) who was born at the peak of lynching and observe how these function as a response to violence, as a defense of the black community, and as a definition of black manhood. Charles Harrison Mason (1866–1961) was the founder of the largest Afro-Pentecostal church, the Church of God in Christ. Mason’s practice and defense of dance is related to his resistance against military conscription. Afro-Pentecostal dance and conscientious objection were affirmations of life, which resisted the expected norms for black men: lifeless acquiescence comportment or life-taking participation in military violence. Black men in COGIC would not allow their masculinity to be made or unmade by violence. Dance and conscientious objection became the rites of black manhood performed as an alternative to practices of either acquiescence or violence. More precisely, Afro-Pentecostal dance and spirituality were expressions of black male agency in a world that attempted to reduce their lives to passivity . If lynching was designed to exercise control over the fate of black men, dance and conscientious objection were intentional countercultural acts of resistance. Thus African American Pentecostal males in the American South in the early twentieth century refused to resign themselves to the dictates of others, but instead they created alternative ecclesial and public spaces within which they shaped their own lives and identities. Within the crucial historic and contemporary conversation about lynching, the rights of Afro-Pentecostal conscientious objection and dance both expand the conversation about the rites of lynching and the rights of black manhood. Lynching: Story, Survey, Mythology In April 1899 a black man, Sam Hose, was lynched in Newnan, Georgia. The day after Hose’s alleged murder of his employer Alfred Cranford and rape of his wife Mattie, before any investigation had been initiated or a physician ’s examination had been made, the front page of the Atlanta Constitution announced: Determined Mob After Hose: He Will Be Lynched if Caught. Six days later, still with no investigation, examination, or trial, the newspaper offered a $500 reward and informed readers of the method of Hose’s death: “he will be either lynched and his body riddled with bullets or he will be burned at the stake . . . the mob which is in pursuit of him is com- Rites of Lynching and Rights of Dance | 97 posed of determined men . . . wrought up...