Max Yergan
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The SCA Native Department held its first conference at Inanda Seminary February 26–28, 1926. Sixty-one student delegates attended from Amanzimtoti (Adams College), Edendale, Mariannhill, Ohlange, St. Chad’s, Umpumulo, and the host institution. Zululand’s Archdeacon Lee convened, tackling the topic of “The Spiritual Life, the Basis of Service.” J. Sandstrom, J. Dexter Taylor and John Dube spoke on social service, and O. B. Bull spoke on the Student Christian Movement (SCM) and WSCF, while the American Board’s H. A. Stick led Bible study. African educators also figured:
Another gratifying feature was the splendid influence exercised by Messrs. Matthews, Lut[h]uli, Bokwe, Guma and Mbamba. Most of these men, now teaching, were at one time, and that not so long ago, forceful student leaders in their respective colleges. It is a sign of our vitality and growth that their devotion to the Movement has continued.49
By April 1926 Max had registered two thousand students in the SCA’s African branches. Within that year Yergan had also made three significant contributions to landmark European ecumenical gatherings. First was the August 1–6 World’s Conference of YMCAs at Helsinki, Finland, while the second was the General Committee meeting of the WSCF at Nyborg, Denmark (August 16–25), and the last was the key September Le Zoute, Belgium, conference. Each appearance granted Yergan and his South African mission keen exposure, establishing him as a critical thinker with a scholarly bent and as a missionary with a flair for formal theological discourse.
In September 1926 Yergan attended the International Missionary Council’s Le Zoute Conference in Belgium to discuss “The Christian Mission in Africa.” Yergan boldly challenged the faith assembly, declaring, “The test that the Africans I know bring to Christianity as they see it is the social teaching of Jesus. They say, ‘What you White men do speaks so loud that we cannot hear what you say.’”50 He left a vivid impression, further strengthening his ecumenical position. In October C. T. Loram, addressing the Tuskegee Institute, publicly invoked his name, saying,
Max Yergan— You should know him; if you don’t know him you should get to know him. He is one of God’s good men. Yergan has done it, by common sense, real goodness and by his wisdom. He is doing in our country what Booker T. Washington and Dr Moton have done for you.51
Furlough
During 1927 Yergan took his first U.S. furlough. In January he received the first Harmon Foundation award for religious service. Soon after, his print output increased to include a brief but pertinent profile in Men of New York called “Seeking Greater Justice,” the key two-part series “Race Currents and Conditions in South Africa” for the Hampton Institute journal, The Southern Workman (April and May), where his earlier World War One exploits had been mentioned a decade earlier.
However, it was in 1927 too that the Yergans lost their great friend, Gold Coast educator J. E. K. Aggrey, who died in Harlem Hospital on April 12. Dr. Aggrey had exerted the most profound influence upon both of them. Not only had Max and Susie been married in Aggrey’s Salisbury, North Carolina, home, but Aggrey’s South African speaking tours in 1921 had also helped lay the groundwork for Max’s own YMCA/SCA travels. Aggrey had also spoken up for him when YMCA and SCA officials shared the government’s fears of admitting an American Negro into the Union. The ironic conjuncture of bidding farewell to this confidant and role model while being touted as his successor in many quarters marked a passing of the baton.
The year 1927 also was the occasion of his first New York Times coverage, coinciding with his introduction to the philanthropic financial nexus via Rev. Anson Phelps Stokes, administrator of the African- and African-American–inclined family fund bearing his surname, and via Edward Clark “Ned” Carter, who facilitated his introduction to both the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. These funding arms of big business claimed a religious base, and Yergan made pitches to all three about his South African work, to great effect.52
Yergan’s Times mention came in connection with a talk he gave to the twenty-fourth annual Northfield, Massachusetts, Women’s Foreign Mission Society Convention, chaired by Lila Mansfield (Mrs. Henry W. Peabody). Yergan, as principal speaker at the meeting, discussed legislation then being contemplated that would remove laborers’ freedom of movement and would also remove literate, enfranchised Africans’ right to vote for government officials. Responding to a query regarding his views on efforts to return various races to their original geographic locations, Yergan said, “That question goes quite far back, and you must be the first ones to decide.… I think I would rather have to ask you that question. Could you do away with all these beautiful buildings and return to crowded Europe?”53
That summer the Yergans also met the wealthy White socialist writer and NAACP member Mary White Ovington. Immediately taken with them, Ovington was sufficiently impressed by the YMCA secretary to include him in her latest literary creation, a volume of biographies of Negro notables entitled Portraits in Color. To be assigned a place along with such luminaries as tenor Roland Hayes and baritone Paul Robeson was a coming of age for Yergan. Of her decision Ovington wrote fellow NAACP member William Jay Schieffelin, “It seemed to me that nothing would help the Negro more than to have the white people look upon him as an individual, not as a type, so I have chosen twenty individuals whom I know and admire.”54 Ovington and Max would continue to correspond over the next few years, especially concerning South Africa. The publication of each of these compendia greatly enhanced Yergan’s public profile.55 By the end of the year Yergan also had been invited, with WSCF editor and author Basil Mathews, to a luncheon “to be attended by people primarily interested in various international publications for the purpose of meeting [Yergan] and perhaps securing some advice” from him.56 Thus opened a new set of doors to periodical publishing.
Deepening Consciousness as a Diasporic African Called to Return to Ancestral Lands
The year 1927 was therefore the year when the reputation Yergan had been cultivating within the missionary and philanthropic nexus on the basis of his overseas endeavors had begun to pay local dividends within North America itself. On its board of advisers sat Rev. Phelps Stokes and African-American sociologist George Edmund Haynes, Urban League founder and Federal Council of Churches race relations specialist. All of these accomplishments increased interest in the nationwide speaking tour he had undertaken to raise funds for the continuation of his South African work. Even so, it was unlikely that the vast majority of people aware of his overseas activities were fully aware of their scale, let alone the degree to which Yergan exerted influence. He himself had begun to reveal some of the strain of operating in a relative vacuum.
Toward the end of 1927 Yergan addressed the Student Volunteer Movement in Detroit on “The Strength and Weakness of the Missionary Movement in Africa.” On the heels of securing funding pledges from the Rockefellers and expanding contacts within the philanthropic world, he used this talk to reflect upon what he had seen in South Africa and its linkage to the broader global challenge to Christian missionaries.
Assuming the position of critical support, Yergan emphasized four problems posed by contemporary Christian practice. These included denominationalism, or competition within Protestant churches; failure to support the growth of indigenous African leaders; and race, described in two distinct contexts, as “racial identification of missionaries with governing powers” and as “the existence or recognition of class or racial differences.” Regarding the latter, Max shared these choice sentiments:
Many Africans maintain, and in many instances not without real justification, that some missionaries share with other whites their feeling of racial superiority or something of racial snobbishness, and that this is exemplified in some instances by the absence of an ordinarily courteous attitude. And in other instances the African Christian complains because he is made to feel by his missionary leader a difference which under the circumstances takes on the stamp of inferiority. The financial relationships between some missionaries and their African workers are sometimes responsible f
or this, and one admits that unless the missionary is particularly and constantly careful, a relationship of employer and employee between himself and his African associates is liable to come into existence, to say nothing of a more strained relationship between himself and the masses of people among whom he is working.57
While he may have appeared to blur the distinction between class and race, their interdependence in South Africa made this a logical approach. As a conciliator Yergan was addressing an audience whose appearance and attitudes mirrored the vast majority of Whites in South Africa; they too, either consciously or unconsciously, identified with the ruling race and class. Yergan gently chided them, admonishing,
There are certain social relationships, or sometimes the absence of such relationships, which are responsible for this idea of superiority and inferiority entering as a great weakness. In the opinion of some people, this is a very delicate point, but, notwithstanding that, one submits in all seriousness and out of real concern for the great cause in which we are interested, that it is a great stumbling block in the way of a full, untrammeled advance of the Kingdom of God in Africa.58
In roughly the same time frame Yergan addressed a European audience on a related theme. Using analogies in the style of Dr. Aggrey, Yergan treated racial prejudice with the parable of a man who hated dogs and then was faced with a wounded animal whose broken leg had to be set. Despite his prejudice and the inconvenience of tending to the despised beast, he did so and found himself changing his mind to the point that he actually went out and bought one. Yergan used this story to show the ways in which human beings, particularly young boys, could learn to get along in spite of their preconceptions of one another. Writing in 1927 against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, he also included Africa:
The present writer has had the interesting experience of hearing boys, to say nothing of men, of at least six different countries and races swear most completely and contemptibly at or about men and boys of other races simply because they belonged to other races. In Africa I have also talked with European boys of two countries who conscientiously believed that the black boys of Africa are in the world solely to make life more pleasant for Europeans. These are but evidences of the existence of racial prejudice or wrong racial attitudes, world wide in extent and supported by otherwise quite intelligent people. Our attitude toward the boys of other races is therefore a very pressing question and we do well to examine very frankly some of the reasons for these manifestly evil relationships in order that we may discover how they may be improved.59
But Yergan did not talk about prejudice outside of its social or economic context. In fact, he made a point of connecting it to the expansion of Europe and America and the various relations and factors of production to which this gave rise.
Moreover, in contrast to social thinkers who treated prejudice as purely psychological, he delineated some of the material consequences of institutional racism:
But the manifestations of race prejudice go infinitely beyond the uttering of words. For instance, in some countries it expresses itself in the laws made by the legislature. By such laws, people against whom there is strong prejudice are denied the right to engage in work for which they may be or may become fitted, also the right to study in public schools, colleges and universities as well as the right to improve their living conditions in keeping with accepted standards. There are countless other petty annoyances such as the inability to get food to eat in public restaurants, or, in some places, to get decent accommodation in public carriers. Race prejudice also manifests itself in what are supposed to be courts of justice. There are communities in some parts of the world where persons who belong to races against which there are strong prejudices find it almost impossible to get a fair trial especially in the lower courts of such communities.60
As in his “Strength and Weakness” article, Yergan here too touched upon the problem of identification with the ruling race. Here he warned his audience not to lull themselves into smug complacency by believing they were free of this malady:
Let not those living in countries where this dread disease does not openly obtain regard themselves as free from it. Nor can they look with a “holier than thou” attitude upon those guilty of prejudiced practices and thank themselves or God that they are not as others. Parts of Africa and America which have been settled by people from all sections of Europe as well as countries of Europe and Asia bear eloquent and awful testimony to this fact: that, thrown under circumstances where it is apparently to one’s advantage to join with others in exploiting a minority or otherwise weaker group, one must be of exceptional qualities not to join with the oppressors, the ignorant or the misguided.61
Max’s remedy for racism in its economic, social, and political manifestations remained righteous Christian practice. Without wishing to judge others by what they felt, did, or did not do in this regard, he offered five suggestions:
I. Let us make use of the best that has been said or is being said today through books on this subject of racial relations and attitudes.
II. Let us seek and encourage personal conduct, fellowship and friendship with members of other races.
III. Let us learn more of the mind and spirit of the Jesus we love whom we profess to follow, on this particular question.
IV. Let us get a new glimpse of what surely must be the will of God who made all people for to dwell together upon the face of the earth.
V. And then, conscious of course, that our goal will not be reached overnight, that the long weary road of arousing and educating sluggish public opinion must be trod,— conscious of these and the other prices that must be paid as was the case for instance with human slavery and the drink evil, let us with a courage born of our belief in God and man set ourselves afresh to the task of understanding, of loving friendship, of service, of a world of God.62
In these articles from late 1927 lay the core of Yergan’s most dynamic and difficult challenges to his consciousness and career. These concerned his relationship to the spiritual and the social, the political and the personal, faith and finance, theory and practice. Shaped by the segregated South of North America, chastened by Indian, Eastern African, and now Southern African experience, he could not ignore the relationship between economics and ideology. Still viewing himself and his salvation in terms of his Christian missionary labors, he also came in contact with other theoreticians whose notion of the social gospel included taking stands to make life on earth more livable for workers and peasants, and between and among Christians and others of different backgrounds.
Meanwhile, Yergan’s national reputation within the United States was soaring. In February he learned that Howard University would award him an honorary M.A. in absentia in June; spoke at Northeastern University on the New Africa; and sailed from New York harbor bound for the Holy Land to attend the International Missionary Council’s Jerusalem meeting from March 24 to April 8.63
In March, long-time Yergan aide Edgar Thamae wrote him from Basutoland. Having served as “a book-keeper and typist for a trading store” in Thabaneng during Yergan’s furlough, Thamae mentioned having seen Professor Jabavu during a recent visit on invitation from Basutoland’s government to speak to the Basotho on agriculture.64 Missing the Yergan family, E. J. Thamae expressed keen anticipation of their return. That this eagerness was largely motivated by his own career concerns cannot be doubted, but the genuine affection Thamae communicated toward the Yergans was unmistakable. Not merely an employer, Yergan clearly functioned as Thamae’s mentor as well. Thamae’s obsequious note opened with the servile salutation, “My dear Master.” In view of Max’s own hereditary relationship to black slavery, this is at least ironic.
Halfway through 1928 Yergan received a letter from a Xhosa doctor who had recently returned from twelve and a half years in the United States, Alfred Bitini Xuma. Born in Manzana, Engcobo District, Transkei, in the Eastern Cape, Dr. Xuma had studied at the Wesleyan mission of Clarkebury and then Edinburgh before acquiring
further schooling in America.65 Destined to make a major mark upon Black South Africa, Xuma had learned about Yergan from Chicago African-American YMCA secretary Grover Little.66 Writing Yergan in June, the physician initiated a friendship that would become important for both families. Citing a letter from Chicagoan George Arthur,67 Xuma had glimpsed Yergan at an international YMCA convention in Des Moines, Iowa. Then, in his no-nonsense fashion, Xuma sought the advice of Max and Susie W. Yergan on the former’s choice of a prospective spouse.68 From this direct and critical inquiry, their relationship developed. Strongly influenced by his lengthy American residence, Xuma sought a bond with these African-Americans.
As was true in the case of the Jabavu-Yergan friendship, Xuma was drawn to Max because of his North American experience, along with the reputation Yergan had gained for his work in both the United States and South Africa. Like Jabavu, Xuma had been impressed by the achievements of those Black Americans who would have fit W. E. B. Du Bois’s definition of the Talented Tenth, equivalent to the “school people.” Accordingly, they arranged to meet when Xuma returned to his Johannesburg home.
But Yergan had also on more than one occasion shown either openly or in a more indirect fashion that his connections to Africa and Africans were not historical alone. Challenged, often even hamstrung by his American upbringing and his conflicted desire to establish his bona fides as “civilized,” as what literate francophone Africans were taught to call évolué, or “evolved”—or, later, assimilated (assimilé)—he too struggled with what Du Bois had termed a double consciousness, a “twoness” that derived from being a Negro and being human, a state more trying perhaps in Africa than stateside for now it meant determining how he should relate to Africa and Africans at home.