Sermons and Preaching

By: Dolan Hubbard

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Sermons and Preaching

Grounded in the church and based to a large extent on improvisation, African American speech acts, keyed to the preacher's cadences and rhythms, provided the aesthetic underpinnings for black oral expression. Forced to creatively imagine their face, black people created a mythology to affirm their tradition as valid and meaningful for all people.

The black preacher is the transformational agent who walks the critical tightrope between the sacred and the secular; his speech act (sermon) is the agent for historical location. As the taproot of black American discourse, the sermon historicizes the experiences of blacks in America. The sermon as agent provides a link between generations of black families and makes it possible for the culture of black America to be transmitted over time and for members of the community to adapt to changing external circumstances. In the process, black America's first poet transformed a venerable Western genre and enriched American discourse.

During the largely unrecorded first century and a half of black life in the United States (1619–1770), the African gods were suppressed and forced to adjust to a new reality. In spite of the indifference and antipathy directed at blacks, many of them in the North followed the religious practices of the New Englanders. Led by their priests-turned-preachers, black people in the South began the process of transforming a largely Protestant Christianity that was daily profaned in their midst, and heavily influenced by a staid English tradition, into one that served African functions.

The first Great Awakening, that tumultuous series of outdoor revivals and camp meetings that swept the country around 1740, made the Christian religion reasonably accessible to the black masses. These revivals paved the way for unordained black lay workers to seize the moment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for the emergence of the historic black church as “the foundation of Afro-American culture.” This independent black tradition was aptly termed “the Invisible Institution” by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier.

Two distinct but overlapping traditions emerged: the slave preachers or “exhorters” who brought color and drama to their imaginative retelling of the trials and triumphs of the Israelites in the Bible, and the learned tradition. The virtuoso style of the slave preacher has been variously described as “old-time Negro Preaching,” “spiritual preaching,” “whoopology,” or “performed” preaching.

Representative figures of these traditions are Harry Hoosier (“Black Harry,” d. 1810), who traveled throughout the United States with Bishop Francis Ashbury, and Richard Allen (1760–1831). Hoosier, who some claimed to be the greatest orator in America, embodied the tradition of the slave exhorters. He represented the genius of “those black and unknown bards” who burst forth in all of their radiance in the wake of emancipation.

Allen represents those black preachers who preached from a manuscript or notes. Initially they were members of the Methodist Episcopal Church or Baptist Church, before founding their own black churches rather than remaining a segregated church within a church. These became the forerunners for the large urban congregations with a well-connected denominational church hierarchy. They took part in public policy debates at the state and national levels.

With several others in Philadelphia, Allen founded the Free Africa Society in 1787, the first organization for blacks in the United States. It was the institutional forerunner to the black church. Allen and Absalom Jones (1746–1818) founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1816, which was the model for the Independent Black Church.

When George Washington (1732–1799) died, the Philadelphia Gazette published Richard Allen's Bethel AME Church sermon in which he stressed Washington's belated uneasiness about slavery as a sin. The first appearance of the summarized sermon in the historical record is an anonymous article entitled “Religious Intelligence: An Account of the Baptism of Nine Negroes in Boston, May 26, 1805.” From its inception in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Afro-Protestant press published sermons for distribution as well as news and literature for a community starved to know itself.

Among the early black preachers in America there were such men as David George (c. 1742–1810), preacher of the First Baptist Church at Silver Bluff, South Carolina; George Liele (c. 1750–1820) of Burke County, Georgia, an eloquent preacher to blacks and whites; Andrew Bryan (1737–1812), founder of the First African Baptist Church of Savannah; the fearless Nat Turner (1800–1831), who served as a kind of exhorter, preaching on Sundays to slaves and some white people; John Chavis (c. 1763–1838) of North Carolina, who was commissioned as a missionary to slaves by the Presbyterians in 1801; and, most rare, Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), a man of learning and eloquence who through all of his life pastored only white Congregational churches in New England.

Haynes, who could have passed for white, did not flaunt his color; he seems to have spoken only once on race and in condemnation of slavery. In “The Nature and Importance of True Republicanism” (1801), he addressed the question of the “pitiful, abject state” of the “poor African among us.” In his most famous sermon, “Mystery Developed,” Haynes discussed religion, prison conditions, and errant justice. Haynes stood with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield with respect to the operations of the Holy Spirit.

Among the earliest black preachers in the Methodist Episcopal Church were Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, Daniel Coker, Abraham Thompson, Morris Brown, James Varick, Christopher Rush, and Henry Evans. Frederick Douglass, who was licensed as a local AME Zion Church preacher, was fond of delivering his “Slaveholder's Sermon” to incite to action those who were fence straddlers in the cause of abolition.

The early black preachers shared a commonality of vision with generations of their pulpit brethren; they challenged the church to be relevant and asked the Lord to “give us this day our daily bread” as they created an African American aesthetic that the community recognized and endorsed.

Irrespective of their denominational affiliation, early black preachers were united in their call for freedom, justice, and human dignity. However, their solidarity with the patriarchal system blinded most of them to the injustices of their own practices, even when those practices were similar to what they were trying to escape from in the white church. For example, Richard Allen, the patron saint of the black church, had great difficulty in admitting women to the ministry.

Refusing to be silent in the face of black men taking advantages of their male privilege in relation to black women (which prefigures much of the post–Civil Rights Movement literature by black women writers), black women preachers vigorously critiqued America's shortcomings and black theologies for the apparent lack of black women in a society that tends to devalue both blackness and womanhood. Feeling obliged to proclaim the word, Jarena Lee, one of the most famous “daughters of thunder,” issued the first official challenge to the restrictions on women preachers in a black denomination (c. 1811): “If the man may preach, because, the Savior died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one? as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear” (Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life, 1976).

According to C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, in The Black Church in the African American Experience (1990), black women were not “officially recognized or ordained as preachers” until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, though slave women undoubtedly “preached in clandestine services.” Unlike their male counterparts, they were required to take “sublimated paths to the ministry” as exhorters, teachers, missionaries, evangelists, religious writers, and wives of clergymen. The AME Zion Church ordained Julia A. J. Foote (1823–1900) as a deacon in 1884 and ordained Mary J. Small as a deacon in 1894. In 1976, Pauli Murray (1910–1985) was consecrated and ordained as the first African American female priest of the Episcopal Church at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. In 1984 Leontine T. C. Kelly (b. 1930) became the first woman bishop of a major religious denomination in the United States when she was elected head of the United Methodists in the San Francisco area. On February 12, 1989, Barbara Harris (b. 1930), an African American, became the first female Anglican bishop in the world.

Among the earliest black women preachers were Elizabeth, A Colored Preacher of the Gospel (1766–1867), Jarena Lee (1783–185?), Zilpha Elaw (c. 1790–184?), Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871), and Amanda Berry Smith (1837–1915). Those women who took sublimated paths to the ministry include Maria W. Stewart (1830–1879), Harriet Tubman (1823–1913), and Sojourner Truth (1797–1883); they were associated with religious abolitionism. Other notable religiously motivated black women became teachers, for example, Fanny Jackson Coppin (1836–1913), Lucy Craft Laney (1854–1933), Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955), and Nannie Helen Burroughs (1883–1961). Dr. Bethune often preached the required chapel service in the Daytona Normal School, the college she founded, which evolved into the Bethune-Cookman College. Until recently, black women were preachers sans portfolio in the large denominations.

Black religion with its Afro-Christian character surfaced in all of its glory in the wake of the Civil War. Simultaneously, divisions within the church became more pronounced as there was a push for an educated clergy. Preachers came to be defined as progressives as opposed to conservatives, spiritual rather than learned. The spiritual preachers placed a greater emphasis on the experiential dimension of religion, emotional and affective witnessing, and an ideology of blackness, as, for example, Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987).

The learned clergy included men such as Peter Williams, Jr. (c. 1780–1840), Episcopal; Daniel A. Payne (1811–1893), AME; William H. Miles (1818–1892), Christian Methodist Episcopal; Henry Highland Garnet (1850–1882), Presbyterian; Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), Episcopal; James Augustine Healey (1830–1900), Catholic; Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), AME; William Paul Quinn (1788–1873), AME; and Francis J. Grimké (1850–1937), Presbyterian, described as the last black Puritan. Payne was the arch-antagonist of anti-intellectual tradition within the black church (as was Booker T. Washington, a deeply religious Baptist who often functioned as an unofficial preacher). He epitomized those blacks and whites who strove mightily to stamp out the resurgence of the “African cult,” which they perceived as a threat to Western Christianity. Advocates of reparation, Crummell and Turner spent much time in West Africa. They left a diverse body of sermons.

The split in the black church that ensued in the wake of emancipation symbolizes the clash between African and European cultures. This division represents a cultural paradox in the black community: black vernacular tradition rooted in the church transformed American discourse, and its signature performance event was the performed sermon. Nevertheless, the black bourgeoisie who set the social agenda tended to suppress the Afrocentric character of the community. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), an effective orator, ardent social reformer, active figure in the education of blacks, and widely published author, articulated these ideological tensions in her novel of uplift, Iola Leroy (1892). The simmering tension provided a dynamic subtext for the Harlem Renaissance debate on the authenticity of black culture in the 1920s, which flared anew with the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s.

In spite of black America's move to assimilate, the end of the nineteenth century was dominated by the flamboyant John Jasper (1812–1901), who was steeped in the tradition of the “classic” folk preacher. This Richmond-based Baptist preacher's most famous sermon was “The Sun Do Move.” In 1908 William E. Hatcher recorded some of Jasper's sermons and published them under the title From John Jasper. Perhaps the first widely available collection of black sermons may have been the book Elder Cotney's Sermons, Gullah Negro Sermons, edited by John G. Williams (1895).

The self-consciousness of the sermon as art form marked the beginning of the twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and James Weldon Johnson in God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) freed the depiction of the black folk preacher from the constraints of dialect under which Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) and Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) chafed, and made him palatable to a growing black middle class ambivalent about its place in American society. As sturdy black cultural bridges, Du Bois and Johnson showed a budding generation of black writers that the black sermon supplied the mythic frame through which the community viewed life in the United States from Spirituals, slave seculars, and Slave Narratives to Blues, jazz, poetry, prose fiction, drama, and, later, Rap Music. Their sage observations on black American religious life marked an important milestone in American cultural studies as they revealed the preacher as both a product and a producer of an aesthetic tradition.

Structurally, Du Bois's Souls, a mixture of theory, history, and sociology, soars with the rhetoric of the black preacher. Replete with words and imagery straight from the black pulpit, Du Bois's language took on the same biblical flavor black Americans used in the campaign to abolish slavery and to end the nightmare of Reconstruction—the South as Egypt, the promised land, and Canaan. Finally, Du Bois's incisive commentary in “Of the Faith of the Fathers” set the tone for American scholarship on the black church.

With the echo of Jasper's “whooped” sermon at his back, James Weldon Johnson in God's Trombones captured the essence of the classic black preacher. Johnson wrote these seven literary sermons “after the manner” of the preacher who is the master of metaphor, triumphant, transcendent, and moving in concert with the community. Johnson, as he notes in his preface, draws on a repertory of classic black sermons that includes the “Valley of the Dry Bones,” the “Train Sermon,” the “Heavenly March,” and the “Creation.”

The art and imagination of the black preacher informs the work of numerous Harlem Renaissance figures, such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. The preacher as archetypal performer is the transitional figure in Toomer's modernist text Cane (1923). Toomer structures much of his text around the dialogic call-and-response that is a staple of black religious discourse. Hughes devotes a section of his first poetry collection, The Weary Blues (1926), as well as a section of his Selected Poems (1959), to poems shaped by the sermon. The textual richness of the symbolic universe of the black preacher informs Not Without Laughter (1930), “Thank You M'am” (1934), and Tambourines to Glory (1958).

Cullen was the adopted son of the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem's fashionable Salem Methodist Episcopal Church; his poetic imagination was governed by an abiding Christian view of the world, as is evident in The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). Much of his religious poetry is filtered through the lens of a vibrant black preaching tradition.

In her 1935 collection of folklore, Mules and Men, Hurston included an excerpt from a folk sermon. The sermon is the organizing principle in Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Deeply influenced by the power of language and myth in and out of the homiletical mode, Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on the emergence of a female self in a male-dominated world. Hurston also brought a theoretical bent to the Black Aesthetic tradition in her essays published as The Sanctified Church (1983).

In addition, Hurston, along with John and Alan Lomax, recorded authentic sermons in the 1930s for the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. In 1941 the black folk sermon formally entered the academy with the publication of the landmark anthology The Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee. Sermons now appear in most anthologies of American and African American literature.

Other archival work on the black sermon includes nine sermons recorded by sociologist Charles S. Johnson for Fisk University and John Henry Faulk's two-year study on black sermons in Texas, sponsored by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. They formed the core of Faulk's 1941 University of Texas M.A. thesis, “Quickened by de Spurit.” Alice Jones's 1942 M.A. thesis for Fisk University was entitled “The Negro Folk Sermon: A Study in the Sociology of Folk Culture.” Perceptive studies of African American sermonry include William H. Pipes, Say Amen Brother! (1951); J. Mason Brewer, The Word on the Brazos: Negro Preacher Tales from the Brazos Bottoms of Texas (1953); Bruce Rosenburg, Can Those Bones Live?: The Art of the American Folk Preacher (1970); Henry H. Mitchell, Black Preaching (1970); Hortense J. Spillers, “Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1974); Gerald L. Davis, I Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know: A Study of the Performed African-American Sermon (1985); and Dolan Hubbard, The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination (1994).

The archival collections of African Americana held in the libraries of Fisk, Howard University, the Atlanta University Center, other African American institutions, Boston University, the Library of Congress, and other municipal and university libraries around the nation include a number of significant and historically important sermons “published” by African American preachers or their congregations. For example, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection at Howard University is the repository for the sermons of Francis J. Grimké, Benjamin E. Mays, and Howard Thurman.

The Great Migration coincided with the emerging cultural industry in the United States. “Race records” were located at the juncture between black transition from peasant culture to denizens of the city with its emergent jazz aesthetics. They presented black America with an alternative venue to the mainstream commercial recording firms. One of the foremost preaching stars of the “race records” was the Reverend J. M. Gates, whose sermon records in the 1920s were exceeded in the “race record” market only by Bessie Smith's blues. Among those preachers that he influenced was Clarence LaVaughn Franklin (1915–1984), who shaped the religious imagination of the generation of preachers who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement.

The classic novels of the Great Migration introduce the notion of history as a sermon. In Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright, in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin (as well as his play The Amen Corner, 1968), and in Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison, the storefront (sanctified) church is the site where blacks contest modernity and its implications for a people trapped in a perpetual present, acutely aware of their liminal status. Wright subverts the sermon, placing it in the mouth of attorney Boris Max and his passionate defense of Bigger Thomas as if to indict America for its failure to deal affirmatively with the problem of black suffering; Ellison uses sermonic rhetoric to enable his nameless narrator trapped outside of history to structure “the blackness of blackness”; and Baldwin, whose Go Tell It represents the apotheosis of the sermon in African American literature, reconstructs the corporate biography to tell how the community “looks back and wonders how we got ovah.” This is the autobiographical impulse that drives black American religious discourse.

The civil rights movement presented black America as one nation under a sermon. Echoing the sentiments of anonymous black folk preachers, Martin Luther King, Jr., invited the nation to step out on space and time and join his downtrodden community in making a more humane world. He called on Americans to adhere to the primary written cultural text (minus the discourse of racism) to which each American pledges allegiance. In his most famous sermon, “I Have a Dream” (1963), King captures the national community's sense of metaphysical possibility when he says, as James Weldon Johnson's preacher does in God's Trombones, “Ill make me a world.” At that moment he gave the nation a breathtaking vision of the Heavenly City. The essential writings of King are contained in A Testament of Hope (1987).

The hegemonic rhetoric of the sermon enabled people, regardless of their ideological orientation, to talk across socioeconomic lines as well as to demand full participation in the American dream. As a consciousness-raising activity, the civil rights movement spawned a call for a black nationalism (SNCC, Black Panthers, Malcolm X), a black theology (James A. Cone), and a womanist theology (Alice Walker). These diverse voices disturbed the popular imagination when they suggested that we are not one nation under a sermon. Cultural nationalists whose work was influenced by the sermon include Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, and Carolyn M. Rodgers.

While King was calling on the republic to end its legacy of racism, black women, who were the backbone of the civil rights movement, were calling on the male-dominated pulpit fraternity to end its legacy of sexism. Alice Walker painted in broad brush strokes the outlines for Womanism in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983). It embraces the elements of tradition, community, self, and a critique of white feminist thought. The term was first used in print in Delores S. Williams's 1987 article “Womanist Theology: Black Women's Voices.” Womanist theology signals black women's move from the pew to the pulpit. The essential challenge, however, remains to bring the word.

The cultural logic of the sermon infuses the fictive world of diverse African American women writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Ntozake Shange. In for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975), Shange captures the temper of a woman-centered discourse when the seven sisters in this choreopoem join hands at its conclusion and chant, “i found god in myself & i loved her.” Using sermonic rhetoric as an entrée, black women writers interrogate the ideological, cultural, and sexual politics that take place under the cover of a male-dominated racial mountain. The self-voicing that emerges out of their work evinces a concern for nurturing and female independence.

Perhaps the most imitated preacher of his era, the incomparable C. L. Franklin (1915–1984), described as “the high priest of soul preaching,” influenced a generation of black preachers who came of age during the civil rights movement. Franklin, paster of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church, was a master of orality and technology. The recorded sermons of this Mississippian swept through a segregated black America like fire shut up in their bones. Among the preachers he influenced were Jasper Williams, Gardener Taylor, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clay Evans, C. L. Moore, Caesar Clark, Donald Parsons, and Jesse L. Jackson. Twenty of Franklin's best sermons have been published as Give Me This Mountain (1989). One of his best known sermons is “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest.”

Other outstanding black preachers of the second half of the twentieth century include: Howard Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Manuel L. Scott, William Holmes Borders, Wyatt T. Walker, Malcolm X, Samuel D. Proctor, Ozro T. Jones, Jr., Calvin Butts, and Frank Madison Reid III. Notable sermon collections include William M. Philpot's Best Black Sermons (1972) and Samuel D. Proctor and William D. Watley's Sermons from the Black Pulpit (1984).

The triumph of the sermon in the black American literary imagination is the triumph of aesthetics. It issued directly out of the ethos of the slave community. African American writers transformed the responsive mythology of African American expressive culture, rooted in music and religion, into arresting artistic statements. Their resulting novels, poems, plays, autobiographies, and rap music, those polyvocal jeremiads, interact with each other in complex ways to constitute a specifically African American literary tradition. Their artistic statements speak to African Americans of history in their own words and rhythms and radiate the promise of the future. The preacher, as a sign of black people's subjugation and affirmation, represents the opaque community's historic struggle over language and, consequently, for self-definition. Through speech acts (sermons), the preacher provides the vehicle by which the entire community of faith may participate in shaping its own history and restructuring cultural memory.

Like preachers, black writers unite in their interrogation of what it means to be black in the United States, accenting the connections of their sermons with blacks' varied selves and with both historical and current social conditions. They transform historical consciousness into art, use it as a strategy for representation, and merge it with the political as they present the emergence of a self. The preachers preach beyond the ending of their earthly situation, while the writers write beyond the frame of their time-bound text. The preacher's voice and the writer's pen are the metonymically displaced voice of the community. The black sermon is the mother's milk of African American discourse.

See also Black Church, The.

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