Words of Fire (57 page)

Another “colored minister of the gospel,” Elizabeth, was greatly troubled over her call to preach, or more accurately, over the response of men to her call to preach. She said: “I often felt that I was unfit to assemble with the congregation with whom I had gathered.... I felt that I was despised on account of this gracious calling, and was looked upon as a speckled bird by the ministers to whom I looked for instruction ... some [of the ministers] would cry out, ‘you are an enthusiast,' and others said, ‘the Discipline did not allow of any such division of work.' ”
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Sometime later when questioned about her authority to preach against slavery and her ordination status, she responded that she preached “not by the commission of men's hands: if the Lord had ordained me, I needed nothing better.”
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With this commitment to God rather than to a male-dominated church structure, she led a fruitful ministry.

Mrs. Amanda Berry Smith, like Mrs. Jarena Lee, had to conduct her ministry outside the structures of the A.M.E. Church. Smith described herself as a “plain Christian woman” with “no money” and “no prominence.”
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But she was intrigued with the idea of attending the General Conference of 1872 in Nashville, Tennessee. Her inquiry into the cost of going to Nashville brought the following comments from some of the A.M.E. brethren:

The oppression of women in the ministry took many forms. In addition to not being granted ordination, the authenticity of “the call” of women was frequently put to the test. Lee, Elizabeth, and Smith spoke of the many souls they had brought to Christ through their preaching and singing in local black congregations, as well as in white and mixed congregations. It was not until Bishop Richard Allen heard Jarena Lee preach that he was convinced that she was of the Spirit. He, however, still refused to ordain her. The “brethren,” including some bishops of the 1872 General Conference of the A.M.E. Church, were convinced that Amanda Berry Smith was blessed with the Spirit of God after hearing her sing at a session held at Fisk University. Smith tells us that “... the Spirit of the Lord seemed to fall on all the people. The preachers got happy....” This experience brought invitations for her to preach at several churches, but it did not bring an appointment to a local congregation as pastor or the right of ordination.
She summed up the experience in this way: “... after that many of my brethren believed in me, especially as the question of ordination of women never was mooted in the Conference.”
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Several black denominations have since begun to ordain women.
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But this matter of women preachers having the extra burden of proving their call to an extent not required of men still prevails in the black church today. A study in which I participated at Union Theological Seminary in New York City bears this out. Interviews with black ministers of different denominations revealed that their prejudices against women, and especially women in the ministry, resulted in unfair expectations and unjust treatment of women ministers whom they encountered.
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It is the unfair expectations placed upon women and blatant discrimination that keeps them “in the pew” and “out of the pulpit.” This matter of keeping women in the pew has been carried to ridiculous extremes. At the 1971 Annual Convocation of the National Conference of Black Churchmen,
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held at the Liberty Baptist Church in Chicago, I was slightly amused when, as I approached the pulpit to place my cassette tape recorder near the speaker, Walter Fauntroy, as several brothers had already done, I was stopped by a man who informed me that I could not enter the pulpit area. When I asked why not, he directed me to the pastor who told me that women were not permitted in the pulpit, but that he would have a man place the recorder there for me. Although I could not believe that explanation a serious one, I agreed to have a man place it on the pulpit for me and returned to my seat in the sanctuary for the continuation of the convocation. The seriousness of the pastor's statement became clear to me later at that meeting when Mary Jane Patterson, a Presbyterian Church executive, was refused the right to speak from the pulpit.
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This was clearly a case of sex discrimination in a black church—keeping women “in the pew” and “out of the pulpit.”

As far as the issue of women is concerned, it is obvious that the black church described by C. Eric Lincoln has not fared much better than the Negro church of E. Franklin Frazier.
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The failure of the black church and black theology to proclaim explicitly the liberation of black women indicates that they cannot claim to be agents of divine liberation. If the theology, like the church, has no word for black women, its conception of liberation is inauthentic.

For the most part, black church
men
have not dealt with the oppression of black women in either the black church or the black community. Frederick Douglass was one notable exception in the nineteenth century. His active advocacy for women's rights was a demonstration against the contradiction
between preaching “justice for all” and practicing the continued oppression of women. He, therefore, “dared not claim a right [for himself] which he would not concede to women.”
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These words describe the convictions of a man who was active both in the church and in the larger black community. This is significant because there is usually a direct relationship between what goes on in the black church and the black secular community.

The status of black women in the community parallels that of black women in the church. Black theology considers the black experience to be the context out of which its questions about God and human existence are formulated. This is assumed to be the context in which God's revelation is received and interpreted. Only from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed can theology be adequately done. Arising out of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, black theology purports to take seriously the experience of the larger community's struggle for liberation. But if this is, indeed, the case, black theology must function in the secular community in the same way as it should function in the church community. It must serve as a “self-test” to see whether the rhetoric or proclamation of the black community's struggle for liberation is consistent with its practices. How does the “self-test” principle operate among the poor and the oppressed? Certainly black theology has spoken to some of the forms of oppression that exist within the community of the oppressed. Many of the injustices it has attacked are the same as those that gave rise to the prophets of the Old Testament. But the fact that black theology does not include sexism specifically as one of those injustices is all too evident. It suggests that the theologians do not understand sexism to be one of the oppressive realities of the black community. Silence on this specific issue can only mean conformity with the status quo. The most prominent black theologian, James Cone, has recently broken this silence. “The black church, like all other churches, is a male-dominated church. The difficulty that black male ministers have in supporting the equality of women in the church and society stems partly from the lack of a clear liberation-criterion rooted in the gospel and in the present struggles of oppressed peoples.... It is truly amazing that many black male ministers, young and old, can hear the message of liberation in the gospel when related to racism but remain deaf to a similar message in the context of sexism....”
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It is difficult to understand how black men manage to exclude the liberation of black women from their interpretation of the liberating gospel. Any correct analysis of the poor and oppressed would reveal some interesting and inescapable facts about the situation of women within oppressed groups. Without succumbing to the long and fruitless debate of “who is more oppressed than whom?” I want to make some pointed suggestions to black male theologians.

It would not be very difficult to argue that since black women are the poorest of the poor, the most oppressed of the oppressed, their experience
provides a most fruitful context for doing black theology. The research of Jacquelyne Jackson attests to the extreme deprivation of black women. Jackson supports her claim with statistical data that “in comparison with black males and white males and females, black women yet constitute the most disadvantaged group in the United States, as evidenced especially by their largely unenviable educational, occupational, employment, and income levels, and availability of marital partners.”
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In other words, in spite of the “quite insignificant” educational advantage that black women have over black men, they have “had the greatest access to the worst jobs at the lowest earnings.”
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It is important to emphasize this fact in order to elevate to its rightful level of concern the condition of black women, not only in the world at large, but in the black community and the black church. It is my contention that if black theology speaks of the black community as if the special problems of black women do not exist, it is no different from the white theology it claims to reject precisely because of its inability to take account of the existence of black people in its theological formulations.

It is instructive to note that the experience of black women working in the Black Power movement further accented the problem of the oppression of women in the black community. Because of their invisibility in the leadership of the movement they, like women of the church, provided the “support” segment of the movement. They filled the streets when numbers were needed for demonstrations. They stuffed the envelopes in the offices and performed other menial tasks. Kathleen Cleaver, in a Black Scholar interview, revealed some of the problems in the movement that caused her to become involved in women's liberation issues. While underscoring the crucial role played by women as Black Power activists, Kathleen Cleaver, nonetheless, acknowledged the presence of sex discrimination.

Cleaver exposed the fact that even when leadership was given to women, sexism lurked in the wings. As executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ruby Doris Robinson was described as the “heartbeat of SNCC.” Yet there were “the constant conflicts, the constant struggles that she was subjected to because she was a woman.”
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Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, some might want to argue that the central problem of black women is related to their race and not their sex. Such an argument then presumes that the problem cannot be resolved apart from the black struggle. I contend that as long as the black struggle refuses to recognize and deal with its sexism, the idea that women will receive justice from that struggle alone will never work. It will not work because black women will no longer allow black men to ignore their unique problems and needs in the name of some distorted view of the “liberation of the total community.” I would bring to the minds of the proponents of this argument the words of President Sekou Toure as he wrote about the role of African women in the revolution. He said, ‘If African women cannot possibly conduct their struggle in isolation from the struggle that our people wage for African liberation, African freedom, conversely, is not effective unless it brings about the liberation of African women.“
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Black men who have an investment in the patriarchal structure of white America and who intend to do Christian theology have yet to realize that if Jesus is liberator of the oppressed, all of the oppressed must be liberated. Perhaps the proponents of the argument that the cause of black women must be subsumed under a larger cause should look to South African theologians Sabelo Ntwasa and Basil Moore. They affirm that”black theology, as it struggles to formulate a theology of liberation relevant to South Africa, cannot afford to perpetuate any form of domination, not even male domination. If its liberation is not human enough to include the liberation of women, it will not be liberation.“
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