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Introduction
- University Press of Mississippi
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- Additional Information
[ 3 ] introduction In a 1932 memorial address about Bishop Archibald J. Carey Sr. (1868–1931), his Episcopal colleague and fellow Georgian, William A. Fountain Sr., commended the deceased prelate in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church for his long career as an “evangelical preacher” and for his “unique position as a public officer who devoted himself wholeheartedly and unselfishly to the service of the public.” Carey, Fountain said, “never feared taking a stand in church or state that he believed to be for the best interest of his racial group,” adding that “the church loved him because he loved the church; the race loved him because he loved the race.” Fountain also understood Carey’s belief in politics as a means for clergy to advance the social and economic interests of their congregations and communities. Wesley J. Gaines, another Georgia-born bishop who knew Carey, had affirmed this view in an 1899 publication, The Gospel Ministry. Though Gaines admonished clergy against partisan affiliations, he observed that a minister “should be alive to what is transpiring around him, and interpret all events in light of divine revelation.” Gaines continued, “Christ advocated the cause of universal liberty, and proclaimed with fiery denunciation against the hypocrisy of the ruling classes both in the church and in the state.”1 William J. Walls, a bishop in the AME Zion Church who lived in Chicago, declared Archibald J. Carey Jr. (1908–81) an heir to the same commitment to ministry and politics that defined his father’s career. In the aftermath of a 1949 battle for fair housing, Walls observed that the junior Carey had made a “great fight” for black advancement: “I know you now as never before in the light of your renowned father. Indeed his spirit is marching on in your honored self.” Other contemporaries expressed similar sentiments about the younger Carey and his blended ministries in church and civic affairs. Daniel G. Hill, the dean of the divinity school at Howard University and a fellow AME, admired Carey’s civil rights speech at a national GOP convention and hoped that Carey would “be spared for many years of usefulness and service to the AME Church and the community of city and nation.” In 1961, a introduction [ 4 ] contributor to the Christian Recorder called Carey “the top civic leader of the world” and “one of the brilliant theological minds of the church.”2 These comments demonstrate that leading clergy reached a consensus that political involvement was integral to ministry and necessary for effective church and community leadership. Moreover, Eric L. McDaniel has noted that “clergy facilitated the connection between religion and politics” and that pastors play “an integral role” in politicizing churches toward shared goals in achieving black advancement . These observations accurately describe the Careys.3 During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Archibald Carey Sr. became a significant figure in Chicago politics. He accepted appointive positions that opened municipal employment opportunities to local blacks. Moreover, his national visibility as a bishop in the AME Church made him a spokesman for the broader interests of black people. In succeeding decades, his son and namesake, also a pastor, achieved local and national elective and appointive offices. African Americans in Chicago and beyond credited the younger Carey with winning important gains for blacks in jobs and housing and praised his role in the criminal justice system. Both Careys pursued politics as intrinsic elements to their clerical responsibilities , moving easily from proclamations in the pulpit to public pronouncements on issues crucial to African American advancement. When Richard Neuhaus published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1979), he decried the exclusion of religious ideas in the making of public policy, noting that the seeming absence of Judeo-Christian perspectives in shaping public debate deprived the American body politic of valuable views that could enrich democratic discourse.4 Neuhaus, however, neglected to point out that scholars of the African American experience had written numerous works about the crucial role of black preachers and black congregations in the struggle for civil rights and their influence on public policy. From Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Henry Highland Garnet, and others in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and their contemporaries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, black clergy have long condemned the racial subjugation of African Americans and offered theological commentaries on civic justice...