Since their arrival on these shores, countless generations of Africa’s daughters and sons had grappled with the questions that their tragic transportation across the Atlantic had presented them with, maybe never as harshly as in the nineteenth century. Prior to 1808, the fate of America’s minions seemed more or less academic, as slavery’s power promised to persist forever. With a formal end to the legal Atlantic slave trade, however, the issue of what role the Africans were to play in New World society in general and in North America in particular returned to frighten the framers of a Constitution countenancing slavery. Many of these men, including the ostensibly most enlightened, from Washington and Jefferson in the Revolutionary and early republican eras right down to the “Great Emancipator” Lincoln, proved incapable of conceiving of a United States where Blacks, ceasing to be chattel, could cohabit freely alongside Caucasians.
Most presidential office holders and the rank and file who looked to them for leadership saw Africans as useful in slavery but outlandish and unassimilable in any other status in America. Their prescription was to return these misbegotten souls to the continent of their ancestors, through deportation. African repatriation was to be accomplished by the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816. In spite of growing evidence that this entity had been organized primarily to safeguard proslavery forces from myriad perceived threats posed by the free Negro group by repatriating them to Africa (thereby reducing the likelihood of their sparking slave rebellions, either actively or by example), wary free people of color and a few kindred White advocates sometimes genuinely saw emigration as a viable alternative to the restrictions leveled specifically against free Negroes across the nation. Reverend William Meade, an ACS agent, started a Raleigh branch of the nascent association in June 1819.11 However, African-American ardor for African colonization waxed and waned, and though interest in Liberian emigration dropped off during the Civil War years, it reappeared to some degree in the aftermath of Reconstruction, in 1877. In that year a series of mass meetings was held in Durham, Concord, and Raleigh, for the purpose of garnering support for African colonization. The fact that only 318 African-Americans quit North Carolina for Liberia under ACS auspices in 1876 and 1894 suggests a lack of enthusiasm for the African alternative.12
Never entirely eliminated by the nineteenth century’s close, African Redemption resurfaced for one group of Black Christians. Aged supporters of African Redemption such as Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, and even Martin Delany had looked to Africa as a potential refuge for embattled New World Negroes anxious to share the Bible’s bounties and aid in Africa’s ascent. By midcentury Ethiopianism and African Redemption had entered the lexicon of mission societies and had reached Christians of every color, including the Baptists who bankrolled Shaw University. Moreover, as foreign invaders more actively intervened in Africa and African lives, a dialogue began among people of African descent concerning the roots of crises then afflicting Africa’s ancestral homelands. Imbued with the spirit of the times, some of the elect became persuaded that the responsibility for this situation lay not so much in the designs and activities of European imperialists as in the purported spiritual poverty of Africans themselves, in their allegedly unbridled ways. The antidote for this condition would be evangelization—to “uplift” a bedeviled, prostrate Africa, “benighted” and rent asunder by primitive superstition and heathen ignorance.13
Support for the idea of emigration to Africa in the final quarter of the nineteenth century was especially strong within the African Methodist Episcopal Church, shepherded by charismatic and uncompromising Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who will be discussed in a later chapter.
Besides the AME congregants, the Negro Baptist Foreign Mission Board placed special emphasis upon Africa and should be seen as an independent force advocating at least temporary emigration with a fervor nearly identical to that motivating Turner and his AME disciples. Baptists galvanized other Black Christians into action, and one of them must have been Frederick Yeargan.
It is well known that the Black church played an important role in both accommodation and amelioration, and education did the same. Frederick Yeargan made a point of informing the enumerator who took the 1900 census that he and his daughters were literate. This would suggest the value he placed on reading and writing. For nineteenth century Americans literacy was often synonymous with schooling, even if one was self-educated, a fact with particular significance for the ex-slave population. This association has a special meaning in light of the role education played in the life of Yeargan’s grandson, Max.
Yeargan’s self-estimate may well have included reflection of the view, prevalent among both Blacks and Whites, that servitude in North Carolina was milder than elsewhere in the Cotton Kingdom, which led to the paradoxical notion of a “slave aristocracy,” which notion was generated in one of the exceptions to the state’s rural norm, Raleigh. The myth avers that North Carolina was “good” to “its Blacks,” especially for skilled slave artisans like Frederick Yeargan, who were understood as having formed an aristocracy within their class on the basis of their greater marketability and relatively privileged status.
While Raleigh’s Wake County was not a key point of production in the plantation economy, it was not immune from reliance upon slave labor. Before the Civil War, scores of slaves had been manumitted, some, like Julius Melbourn, becoming quite wealthy. And degree of education was probably important for a sense of membership in this aristocracy.
Education was one of the principal vehicles for “uplift” in the American South, especially for those African-Americans afforded the rare opportunity of advancing to the college level. Many drew connections between religion and education as practically and morally significant, as was explicitly emphasized throughout the nineteenth century by both literate slaves and free men and women, on the one hand, and, on the other, legions of northern-educated, mainly White missionaries who went South to spread the gospel and sanctify the “heathen,” “benighted” freedmen after the Civil War.
Frederick Yeargan, deacon and trustee of the Second Baptist Church, must have given Max the august example of a grandfather who led in and supported Negro education and who concretized the notion that church ministry provided the archetype of the most honorable profession for Raleigh’s responsible Black men. The institutions where Yergan attained his education both had denominational Protestant roots: St. Ambrose Academy, an Episcopal primary school, and the academy and university (or preparatory and college) branches of Shaw University.14
Shaw University, during Yergan’s time the premier institution of Negro higher education for the entire state of North Carolina, proved vital to his professionalization. Shaw took particular pains to attract and prepare candidates for missionary service in Africa, drawing not only upon African-Americans but also among other members of Africa’s diaspora.
The institution was “intended to maintain a high degree of character and scholarship, and only students who were willing to comply cheerfully with reasonable rules and regulations” were desired at the university. The curriculum followed by Shaw was a familiar blend of practicality and philosophy characteristic of nineteenth-century pedantry. The moral instruction that chapel and Bible recitation provided was augmented by daily drills in Greek and Latin—a classicist repertoire. By all indications, Yergan proved eminently successful in these subjects, making dean’s list, reading sociology, law, and history, majoring in modern languages, earning a letter in football, and debating—then graduating cum laude, heading his 1914 class as valedictorian. It was an achievement many would comment on.
African Redemption, Ethiopianism, and both manual and academic education were strongly stressed during Yergan’s era. This fact and Shaw’s Africanist presence also helped shape him. The chosen vehicle through which Yergan was enabled to pursue spiritual “uplift” while preparing for Africa’s redemption was the Shaw Young Men’s Christian Association.
At the time, the Black YMCA was for some a pote
ntially radical institution. The premier YMCA student association serving Negro youth appeared in 1869. Its first Black leader, William Alphaeus Hunton, ended decades of exclusively White control. He was assisted in 1898 by Ohio-born Jesse Edward Moorland, who came to be so powerful that he was able to influence the purchase and erection of almost every building used by African-American YMCA members in the United States. Moorland became a mentor and confidant of Max Yergan.
Both the English YMCA and its filial North American branch charged themselves with the tasks of providing humble, cooperative, Christian-derived (albeit nondenominational), soft leadership alternatives to the hard-edged economic and political proletarian radicalism raging through mid-nineteenth-century Europe and America. Of primary concern to representatives of each transoceanic chapter was a growing petite bourgeoisie, the emergent mediating stratum of craftspeople and educated youth preparing to join the workforce as apprentices, artisans, clerks, managers, or entry-level professionals. Following the U.S. Civil War, the YMCA attracted striving Black men, many viewing it as a way up the fabled ladder of success in American society.
Black YMCA secretaries soon became highly respected figures on Negro college campuses, powerful sources of inspiration to fellow students, whom they then exhorted to ambitiously strive toward success in Jim Crow America. They fulfilled a vital social function, for well into the 1920s very few positions stood available to most African-American professionals. YMCA role models could broaden horizons, providing faith to face up to typically uncertain futures, “each demonstrating dignity and manhood in a segregated institution.”
Born into a society whose values were shaped by patriarchal traditions and institutions and into a caste for whom subaltern status was religiously reenacted in ruthless rituals, Yergan and fellow male “New Negroes for a New Era” chose Y service as a means of undoing what had been done, of pursuing perquisites prized.
By 1915, Max Yergan had become a man of mark, having worked his way up through annual student conferences, chief among which was a series of yearly Colored Work Department Summer Institutes hosted at Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Yergan’s organizational gifts were initially recognized at the 1912 meeting inaugurating this summer school tradition. Dr. Mays wrote,
Only men with a message that spoke to the needs of Negroes, and who had a point of view that enabled Negro students to look more hopefully beyond their circumscribed plight, were invited to speak at Kings Mountain.… It was an oasis in a desert of segregation and discrimination… because the conference was under the auspices of Negro executives and administrators.15
By the turn of the twentieth century many humanitarians of both races were sometimes chagrined at having to take sides in the looming ideological struggle increasingly separating the advocates of academic education for a classically trained Negro elite, or “Talented Tenth,” including W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, and Ida B. Wells, from champions of Booker Washington’s Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education. As the moral combat between these rival schools became more keen, the foundations and local and state governments tended to take the side of the tried and true and less strident Tuskegeean. Even so, the Progressive Era did see rare southern Whites and a few Blacks working to ameliorate the Negro condition in the South—but within the confines of segregation and disfranchisement. Some of these people chose the YMCA as their instrument; in spite of its ambivalence and willingness to acquiesce in certain oppressive realities, some viewed the YMCA glass as half full rather than as half empty and did the best they could there.
One of the more dramatic illustrations of an emergent Black voice in the YMCA came at the organization’s thirty-eighth international convention in Cincinnati in 1913, which proved particularly portentous for Yergan, for it prefigured the intersection of those dual ideological prongs that lent his mission its unique power: the social gospel doctrine and the allied theology of Black liberation. Walter Rauschenbusch of Rochester University emphasized the need for social activism and the duty of Christians to eliminate the exploitation of one group of human beings by others who undertook to rule them in an age shaped by robber barons and rampant, amoral industrialism, which threatened the entire human species.
This is our chance to unseat privilege, to stop the dishonoring forms of income, to insure the full income to all who work. This is the time to keep down the growth of classes in our nation, which are now springing up so rapidly. If we do not succeed in making that change toward full economic democracy today, then we shall have springing up a still firmer hold of the few on the masses, on the means of production; then we shall have property gathering in the hands of a limited class, and the control of property gathering in the hands of still fewer men.
Rauschenbusch foresaw leading roles for enlightened members of the petite bourgeoisie, the educated stratum. In his schema, the intelligentsia should be the natural allies of the proletariat, and only if they played this part would circumstances measurably improve for the laboring orders. There is a voice of class struggle here, and a voice moderating in the direction of class collaboration. Both of these voices appear crucial in contextualizing Max Yergan, for their echoes resound insistently in prose generated by him over a thirty-year period. This fact notwithstanding, little within Rauschenbusch’s presentation directly addressed the singular circumstances facing Black delegates, whose material conditions were circumscribed not only by social stratum but also by race. Their advocate was Robert E. Jones, president of the Colored YMCA in New Orleans. Jones evoked the collaborative spirit of Booker T. Washington and argued for a bold commitment to forging interracial unity within the Y and America at large: “In the face of the common social evils, in the face of our city problems and other dangers that threaten, under the call of the Young Men’s Christian Association of America, may not all men who desire the coming of the kingdom of God on earth work side by side, and drive back the common foe.”
The YMCA encouraged Black leadership cadres through conferences sponsored at Tuskegee, Atlanta, and Hampton Universities, and Yergan voiced a first definitive commitment to the cause of African Redemption at the 1914 Atlanta conference, announcing that he had altered his career plans from the law “to some form of Christian service.” Also noteworthy is that this Atlanta meeting contained a timely panel conducted by the Commission on the Enlistment of Educated Negroes for Work in Africa, whose Pan-Negro observations were clearly associated with African Redemption and Ethiopianism, though at this point, African Redemption focused on saving individual souls rather than on politically redeeming Africa from the clutches of European imperialism.16
After he attended this gathering, the course for the next few years of Yergan’s life began to become a little clearer. After graduating from Shaw in 1914, Yergan soon registered in the secretarial course at Springfield College, Springfield, Massachusetts, where in the early twentieth century YMCA secretaries were trained.17 This was ordinarily a three-year program, but presumably Yergan’s B.A. made him eligible for advanced standing, as he entered the junior class of 1914–1915. The course was for general secretaries, educational directors, railroad secretaries and heads of departments in the YMCA. After completing the program, he returned to Washington, D.C., “for the International Director’s position.”18
After a brief period of service as a traveling student secretary in the Southwest, the outbreak of the First World War in Europe hastened Yergan’s realization of the goal of Christian service in a foreign mission.
Attending the May 1916 International Convention of the YMCA in Cleveland, Yergan surprised colleagues when he answered a stirring “call” issued by E. C. Carter, national secretary of YMCA War Work in the Far East, for forty hearty volunteers to serve the “native” troops in India. Not one to mince words, Carter warned that anyone who joined would be “surrounded by every conceivable danger to life known to man,” adding that “the only reward for service was likely to be a body broken by disease or death.”19
Yergan’s response
to Carter’s call was profound, immediate, and visceral. So moving did he find Carter’s words, in fact, that six years later he told an interviewer of his reaction, which the writer reconstructed in prose evocative of love’s rapture: “Afraid to trust himself—for fear he had been swept off his feet—Yergan spent an entire night in prayer before he announced his decision to enlist as a war worker.”20 By June, Yergan requested a leave of absence in order to join Carter’s Indian mission.21
In the half-year he spent in Bangalore, Yergan was Carter’s protégé. Understandably attractive to Max, the type of Yankee that Carter probably represented was the kind who had boldly gone south in the promising Reconstruction years—the militant, liberal social gospelers who had made their presence felt in historically Black institutions of learning. They invariably proved unforgettable for those optimistic masses who benefited from their tutelage.
The world YMCA movement had had a long and close identification with military service. For instance, in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, YMCA labor was deemed vital enough to warrant creation of an Army and Navy Department in the International Committee of the North American branch. A Y partisan characterized its stated purpose as addressing “the needs of soldiers on the firing line, in forts, on battleships, in national guard camps, and wherever their services were needed.”22 Max’s decision instantly made him a celebrity within the Colored Work Department ranks.
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