The American Future (26 page)

But White was resolved. He would have his young men and women “sing the money out of the hearts and pockets of the people.” The choir of seven, with no proper cold-weather coats or clothing, opened their tour at Oberlin in October 1871, where they were warmly
applauded, but the clapping failed to translate into strong receipts. The same was true in Cincinnati: many huzzahs but just fifty dollars. In New York everything changed as, often, everything does. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher brought the Fisk Singers to the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and overnight they became a sensation. Verbal brickbats were thrown at them but so were dollars, enough to pay their expenses and ensure the survival and even flourishing of Fisk. There was a price to be paid for the relentless touring: Mabel Lewis harmed her larynx; White himself, Maggie Porter, and Fred Loudin all became ill with bronchitis and pneumonia. White's tubercular cough became chronic, incurable; stifled somehow during the recitals. They were playing now to audiences of 10,000 and more.

White pleaded with the president of Fisk, Erastus Cravath, for a break, but the college needed funds and the choir went on a second European tour to England (again), Holland, and Germany in 1875. Many of the singers were now on the verge of collapse. White had left, feeling he had created a monster; a form of show-business slavery. After the choir disintegrated in sickness and argument, he re-formed them in 1878, as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Jubilee of course being the biblical moment when all bondsmen were liberated. When TB prevented White from being with them, Fred Loudin took charge for tours that took the singers through Asia to Australia and back to the West Coast of the United States. In 1895 White's own lungs finally gave out. At his funeral the choir sang “Steal Away,” their voices lifting the Nashville chapel roof off.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers had become an institution, exactly at the moment of a racial counterrevolution that put into question the victory of the Civil War. Outside the United States (and frequently inside), it is often forgotten that during the Reconstruction decade from 1865 to 1875, an extraordinary flowering took place. Protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution conferring full citizenship and voting rights on the former slaves, and abolishing segregation in public places (other than schools and ceme
teries!), African Americans flocked to the polls. Federal troops, still stationed in the South, were there to uphold their right to vote should that become necessary. The first African American governor was elected in Louisiana; congressmen and senators followed. Turnout was on the order of 70 percent; a level which Barack Obama would be happy to achieve almost a century and a half later. Among the defeated white population of the South, with some honorable exceptions, all of this was viewed as tragic farce; the enforcement of an occupation; the blacks as puppets of sinister northern carpetbaggers who had battened on their ruined country like ravening coyotes. The sentimental literature of defeat now actually hymned the virtues of the slaves: honest, toiling, decent in their simple way; while the monsters unloosed by the Freedmen's Bureau were promiscuous, idle, and empty-headed. The only hope of overturning such an unnatural order of things and restoring God's proper racial hierarchy lay with the Democratic Party. So when their candidate Samuel Tilden won a plurality of the popular vote in 1876, the bargain struck with the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, included the withdrawal of federal troops from the Southern states. And that was that: the Civil Rights Act set at naught; poll taxes and literacy tests put in the way of the vote; segregation everywhere triumphant; violence and intimidation unleashed against any blacks presuming differently. Thomas Wentworth Higginson resumed a literary life as Emily Dickinson's mentor, protector, and posthumous editor while Jim Crow reigned in the South.

Except in two places: black colleges like Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta (later Morehouse, where Martin Luther King studied) and the black church. In both those institutions, a battle was fought, at the end of the nineteenth century, for the “souls of black folk,” between Booker T. Washington's practical gradualism, bought at the expense of political self-determination, and DuBois's call for church and school to produce a liberation vanguard. DuBois was a light-skinned son of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which was about as far away from the sharecropper South as you could get (though he would write movingly and accurately of the impoverished rural counties of Georgia). Fisk had given him an undergraduate education, but he had been a graduate student at Harvard, studying with William James and George Santayana, as well as the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Before
he came to Atlanta University he taught at another black college, Wilberforce in Ohio, and the University of Pennsylvania. What DuBois came to want from black education is pretty much exactly what America has in the Democratic nominee in 2008: someone not only unapologetic about the empowerment of learning in an age of mass democracy, but who could also convincingly project knowledge as a tool of liberation. DuBois pinned his hopes for an educated black future on the “talented tenth” of black America—that would be embarrassingly elitist now—but when he turned away from an intellectual vanguard toward the mass of his people he looked in exactly the same direction as Obama: toward the church.

For although the Harvard-educated pragmatist himself became more skeptical as he aged, he always knew that the black church functioned as more than a house of worship. The 24,000 black churches were also “the social center of Negro life in the United States”; a communal government that, because it had roots deep in the antebellum world of the Richard Allens and Jarena Lees, functioned far more effectively as a government than anything the more thinly attached politics of Reconstruction had managed. After the liquidation of Reconstruction the church “reproduced in microcosm, all that great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition.” Allen's own Mother Bethel Methodist church in Philadelphia, at the turn of the twentieth century, had more than 1,100 members, “an edifice seating 1,500 persons and valued at $100,000, an annual budget of $5,000, and a government consisting of a pastor with several assisting local preachers, an executive and legislative board, financial boards and tax collectors, general church meetings for making law…a company of militia and twenty-four auxiliary societies.” DuBois could also have mentioned schools, sickness insurance, and burial societies. In its cradle-to-grave inclusiveness Mother Bethel was just one of the black megachurches, indistinguishable, except in pure numbers, from their black and white counterparts of today.

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.

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 doing. 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.