by Simon Schama
And they were not limited to the old abolitionist North. The most cursory look at the prodigious archive of memoirs and local histories provided by Charles Octavius Boothe’s Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama reveals a world of astonishing cohesiveness and richness; the matrix from which eventually the civil-rights generation would spring. It would be possible to read the accounts of the temperance clubs, city missions, sewing schools, the hundreds of Sunday schools operating in Birmingham alone, as evidence of the formation of a Booker T. Washington world of practical, politically self-effacing “Negroes.” But look a little further and you find the embryo of vigorous self-determination: a Colored Baptist Convention in Montgomery, 1888; the Colored Deaf and Dumb Asylum; an entire network of state school inspectors; a University in Selma, the offspring of the St. Phillip Street Church founded by Samuel Phillips, an ex-slave who had been freed for serving as a soldier in the Mexican War; post offices; fire stations; ambulance services; men like Addison Wimbs of Greensboro, who was (so he boasted) the first black in Alabama to use a typewriter, and then an Edison phonograph—for the white governor of the state at the turn of the century. It was in those places that the early history of the “freedom church” and the self-emancipating world within slave culture was preserved and passed on to the next generation.
In his book Boothe reviewed the distance he thought his people had come since slavery, going out of his way to comprehend the bitter rage of the white South, but making sure that the history of self-making against the odds in the years after the war, in a landless, sharecropping world, was put on record. “With homeless mothers and fathers, with homeless wives and children, and with oppression on every side—with all these burdens and much more which cannot be told upon us—we bravely undertook the work of building the walls of Zion. The writer knows a minister who (between 1886 and 1875 especially between ’66–’77 during the reign of the ‘K. K. Klan’ when the people could not in many places be induced to open their doors after dark for fear of being shot) has endured some of the severest privations and performed some of the hardest toils known to the ministry at his own charges. This case is only one in hundreds.” At the end of the book, the Alabama Publishing Company of Montgomery that printed it advertised, along with the Reverend Pettiford’s manuals on Divinity in Wedlock, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, which promised liberation rather than sewing schools.
21. Easter Sunday, 2008, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta
Hanging on the vestibule wall were fading photos of past pastors of Ebenezer, stretching back all the way to Reconstruction Atlanta: a gallery of nobly chiseled faces, composed in attitudes of dignified sobriety; some embellished with the luxuriant whiskers of the prophets, all austerely dressed; faces that looked as though they knew they belonged in an ecclesiastical genealogy even before they actually did. Inside the church, perfectly costumed, impossibly beautiful children were giving everything they had to the Easter play, the odd shouted line “Oh MARY!” the only sign of nerves. Watching them, faces wreathed in smiles, were the parents, the grandparents, friends, the schoolteachers, all of them dressed in elegant suits and print dresses. Slopes of white lilies rose sheer behind the pulpit and in front of the choir, which if not quite on the scale of First Woodstock, out in the piny suburbs, was still a goodly hundred voices. At Pastor Johnny’s megachurch there had been but two black faces in the choral ensemble; in Ebenezer, one white woman, back row of the sopranos, presumably with a set of power lungs on her.
This Ebenezer was just the latest reincarnation of many predecessors, all in the same neighborhood of Atlanta, a block or two from Martin Luther King’s old brick temple, now canonized as a national historic site. The interior of the new church represented the history of its congregation: African teak and stained Georgian oak, married together in decorative designs, inset into the columns supporting the gallery. As wide as it was deep, the church seemed at once shelter and opening, which was, I suppose, more or less what its original founder had in mind two millennia ago.
I was assuming holy fireworks. A few days earlier, the former pastor of Barack Obama’s Chicago church and a longtime family mentor, Jeremiah Wright, had been denounced on right-wing talk radio as an America-hating fanatic. A video clip of Wright, his voice rising in hoarse rage to proclaim “God bless America? God damn America” for its manifold sins of racism, had been aired in an endless loop on cable television stations, gleeful at the ratings gift that had suddenly come their way. No one was sure whether or not the current incumbent of Ebenezer, Raphael Warnock (Harvard Divinity School), would grasp the nettle; or whether he’d be saying anything political at all on Easter Sunday, but in any case, we had brought our own protagonists. On one side of me sat Angela and Fred Gross, business professionals in elegant early middle age; on the other, Mark Anthony Green, Morehouse College political science student, male-model looks and shoes to match. Fred and Angela were on fire for Hillary; Mark Anthony had come not to bury Obama but to praise him, to the skies if that’s what it took.
We had first met Fred and Angela a month earlier on Super Tuesday, at their house in an upscale Atlanta suburban cul-de-sac, manicured swathes of lawn shaded by tall firs and cedars. Leading off the center hallway were plumply cushioned living rooms, a formal dining room and the obligatory gourmet kitchen. Swimming against the tide, Angela had invited friends round to run a phone canvass for Hillary. Theirs was a classic story of baby-boomer black prosperity. Fred had come out of the air force and made money in the catering business; Angela had been teacher, lawyer, executive. Like the other black women who arrived at the house, she was offended by the presumption that she was bound to fall in line behind the African American candidate. Gender mattered more to Angela than race. “See,” she said, leaning on the table, fixing me directly in the eyes, “men mouth off a whole lot, women get to clean up the mess.” Fred (also a Hillary supporter) turned and did something noisy with the ice bucket.
We talked about the civil-rights movement and the part the churches had played in it. This was, after all, Martin Luther King’s and W. E. B. DuBois’s Atlanta. “Look,” said Angela’s friend Lisa, “we’re all churchgoing here; every Sunday rain or shine. Sure, faith mattered back then; how could it not? The church was the only place our people felt safe, bound together. But things are different now. Our religion is just our own private business. It’s a hard world out there and it needs hard-headed people to cope with it. Hillary knows what’s what. She’s not just hot air.” “How do we know Obama has a clue how to fix what’s broken?” Angela chimed in. “She’s proven; she’s been tested.” And the look on her face made me think Angela wasn’t just talking about the Senate.
Earlier that day, I’d sat down with Mark Anthony on a low wall at the Morehouse campus. The statue of Martin Luther King was around the corner. How important was faith to the Obama campaign? “It means a lot to me,” the young man said, “maybe everything. I just know that after all that we have been through, this is our moment.” Later on the doorstep of a black neighborhood in the city he would ask the lady who opened the door, “Do you believe God wants Barack to be president?” “I surely do,” she said, smiling. So Obama was the prophet and Mark Anthony and countless other kids up and down the country were his evangelists. They wouldn’t be surprised at his announcement that he plans to extend the faith-based initiatives begun by George Bush in the delivery of schooling and social services. But unlike the outgoing president and in keeping with his reading of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, Obama would open access to those services irrespective of denomination.
That evening in the Democratic Party watering hole, the two camps coexisted uneasily beneath the television screens registering primary tallies from around the country. By ten in the evening, amid the debris of hot dogs and beer bottles, it was already apparent that Hillary and Barack were going to split the vote, but that he had run away with Georgia in a landslide. Remarkably, the deeper south the primaries went, the better he was do
ing. Even more astoundingly, he had won more than 40 percent of the white male vote in the state. Brought together in a corner of the bar, the women were in a feisty mood. Jabbing a finger in Mark Anthony’s direction, Lisa said, “If he weren’t black would you want him to be president?” Answering right back, Mark Anthony moved his beautiful face closer to his rhetorical assailant and said, “If her name weren’t Clinton and she weren’t a woman would you want her as president?” “How DARE you?” Lisa yelled back over the tavern din. “How DARE you?” She and Angela might have been lecturing their wayward teenage son. “You think you have all the answers, and I thought so too when I was your age, a head just full of dreams and fancy notions, but let me tell you that’s not the way the world works and you’d better wise up fast because nothing your fine preacher man says is going to give folks who don’t have health care the drugs and the treatment they need, nor get kids who drop out to stay at school, or keep the world from getting messed up a whole lot worse than it is already, and if you don’t believe it you are going to find out the HARD way.”
And smiling under the storm of fury he had set off, Mark Anthony stood there, holding his ground, keeping the faith; saying there were just times when the old rules didn’t apply, when America needed to turn the page. This was the time, his time.
Now the protagonists were gathered in the same row in Ebenezer. Fred and Angela were there with their son, daughter-in-law, and the cute three-year-old granddaughter who kept climbing over the back of the pew in front to widen her green eyes at me and make faces. I made faces back; I’m good at that. The peace was kept. The Ebenezer choir, to my disappointment, had stuck to a grandiose version of the hymnal. Handel was much in evidence. But then they broke into one of the old spirituals, and in an instant, there was the swaying, clapping, the Music and the Frenzy that DuBois loved to hear, and the walls of the church shook with the jubilation of it.
Pastor Raphael Warnock, resplendent in a white gown with a high collar, trimmed in scarlet thread, the purity and the blood sacrifice turned into ecclesiastical chic, began the Easter sermon. He was loose and powerful at the same time, familiar and august; joking about his own childhood nerves at having to do the Easter play, and then warming to the lesson at hand, he made it clear from the get-go that he would not shrink from the controversy. “For some days now, the black church, America’s freedom church, has been under attack from the press.” Jeremiah Wright, who may or may not have been guilty of intemperate statements, was only the proximate target. It was the church itself that was a thorn in the side of the right-wing rabble-rousers. They wonder why we are angry the young pastor asked, his voice rising sardonically. “Three hundred years of slavery and segregation and they wonder why we are ANGRY?” (The last word a great roar of fury itself.) Then followed a brilliant disquisition on the selective conscience of white America; the dishonesty with which it trumpeted the virtues of democracy without confessing the sins of perpetuated inequality. And I thought of all those who had come before Warnock, before King; of David Walker in 1829, of Frederick Douglass in 1851 who asked rhetorically what could the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence possibly mean to him while slavery persisted in the republic? And Warnock built and built the music of his sermon, stepping from the pulpit out into the congregation, bidding them stand up, to rise up, for that was the message of the Easter Passion and resurrection, stand up for salvation, and the whole congregation did, shouting and singing and acclaiming, and at that moment in that church they were all there again, Andrew Bryan and Richard Allen and Jarena Lee and Fannie Lou in one great communion of purpose, and on cue the choir burst into voice and you thought for a moment the roof was going to be raised and we would be opened to the blue Atlanta heavens.
22. Great white hopes?
Now here’s a peculiar thing: the Republican candidate, on a hilltop in North Carolina, come to seek the blessing of the evangelical Grahams, father and son, Billy and Franklin, is caught in a photo op looking as though he would rather be anywhere else, the smile glued on, his whole demeanor a portrait of a man in extreme discomfort. Meanwhile the Democratic candidate goes to Zanesville, Ohio, the kind of small town where nineteenth-century circuit riders shook up the faithful and is seen amid tow-haired students at a Christian community college saying that support for faith-based community services would be “at the moral center” of his campaign.
Obama has always pitched his appeal ecumenically, wanting Americans divided by the culture wars to come together in the broadest of tents. Peeling off white believers from their allegiance to the Republican Party seems, at first sight, a stretch. The history of white Protestantism after the Civil War seemed to take it as far as possible from that of the black church. In the South, its ministers were determined to sanctify the defeated heroes—Lee, Davis, and above all General Stonewall Jackson, whose life was canonized as a model of selfless Christian gentility. Every time another Confederate general died, the funeral was used by the church to project an image of the South as a shot-through citadel of Christian virtues, holding the fort against an oncoming tide (especially in the New South) of commercial debasement, sexual depravity, and liquor-drenched stupor: the sins of the metropolis marching on the corn-fed encampment of the righteous. While it was appreciated that the black churches were all that stood between this bastion of “civilized” America and the terrifying specter of Blacks on the Loose, extreme vigilance was needed if what remained of the right order of things was to survive the assault of modern vice.
It was in that paranoid atmosphere that, during Reconstruction, the founders of the Ku Klux Klan presented themselves as an order of modern crusaders. With their headquarters in Nashville, cheek by jowl with Fisk and its singers, and their imperial wizard the Confederate ex-general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan rapidly developed into a vigilante organization, bent on terrorizing anyone opposing the perpetuation of white supremacy or supporting the institutions of Reconstruction. In the minds of the Klansmen they were resisting an alien Northern occupation, but their violence was so out of control that Congress outlawed the order in 1871. Some thirty years later, however, a North Carolina Baptist minister, Thomas Dixon Jr., gave it a second life. His novel The Clansman featured a Presbyterian preacher to the Klan giving his blessing to their battle to protect “Christian white civilization” from the depravity of black scalawags and their Yankee carpetbagging puppeteers. Filmed by D. W. Griffith as The Birth of a Nation, the movie fired thousands to rejoin a Klan reborn after the ex-Methodist minister William Simmons led a procession up Stone Mountain outside Atlanta. Beneath relief carvings of the Confederate heroes Lee, Davis, and Jackson, an altar was erected and the first Klan cross burned. By 1921, there were more than 100,000 members, organized in cells from the Midwest right through the old South, and many of them heard sermons and lectures from Protestant clergy who endorsed their claim to be protecting southern Christianity from the bestiality of the lower races—Jews as well as blacks.
Photographic Insert
Heroic full-length of the quartermaster general Montgomery C. Meigs, by Mathew Brady, in his Roman pose of tragic meditation. Meigs himself was an accomplished, enthusiastic photographer.
Gilbert Stuart’s 1805 portrait of Thomas Jefferson, the presidential founder of West Point.
John Trumbull’s 1806 portrait of Alexander Hamilton—ex-soldier, secretary of the treasury, who had much more ambitious plans for a peacetime army and a military college.
The inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, 4 March 1861, beneath Meigs’s unfinished Capitol Dome.
Montgomery Meigs in command of the force mobilized to defend Washington from a Confederate offensive, 1864.
The West Point Class of 1863. John Rodgers Meigs is sitting against the wall, front row, center. Photograph taken probably in 1862.
John Rodgers Meigs in the uniform of a lieutenant of the Engineers when he was attached to Sheridan’s army, 1864.
The beginning of Arlington National Cemetery: the occupation, on
Meigs’s orders, of Robert E. Lee’s house and grounds on Arlington Hill, 28 June 1864.
Mass-produced pin, worn by those who wanted to advertise their patriotic indignation at the sinking of the USS Maine and their enthusiasm for the Spanish-American War.
Theodore Roosevelt in full cry, 1905.
Mark Twain, middle-aged gadfly of imperialists.
Fannie Lou Hamer, speaking to the Credentials Committee on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Party Convention, Atlantic City, August 1964.
The campaign to register black voters, Virginia, 1960.
Printed version of Jefferson’s original draft for the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, 1778–79, sections of which were preserved in the version James Madison steered through the Virginia Assembly in 1786.
Charles Grandison Finney, the abolitionist thunderer of Oberlin, with the eyes that made sinners and slavers cringe.
