W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociology of the Black Church and Religion, 1897–1914

Abstract

In W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociology of the Black Church and Religion, 1897–1914, Robert Wortham presents W. E. B. Du Bois as a founder of the subdiscipline of sociology of religion. Du Bois contributed to systematizing knowledge of the quality of African American life, the Black Church, and the development of the concept of ‘‘double consciousness’’; and these contributions can be canonized into an exclusive group of classical sociological statements. The author raises the issue that Du Bois integrated quantitative and qualitative data analysis with greater depth than Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel in defining the subdiscipline of the sociology of religion. The book’s significance rests in its emphasis on how the Black Church preserved the basic functions of African tribal life. ‘‘The Negro Church came before the Negro home, it antedates their social life, and in every respect it stands today as the fullest, broadest expression of organized Negro life’’ (p. 33). The book provides an alternative perspective to Durkheim’s claim of the family as a basic unit for analyzing social life by demonstrating that the Black Church provided similar functions within the African American context during the dawn of the twentieth century. The dates 1897 to 1914, listed in the title, are significant in that those years describe the era after the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruling that brought Jim Crow laws into full fruition until the beginning of the First World War. The book’s timeliness rests in the idea that African Americans and other racial minorities within the United States have been subject to revisionist accounts that truncate the Black Church’s significance as providing a foundation for an alternative civil society for the excluded and a means of survival. The author defends the slave uprising in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture and the insurrection under the leadership of Nat Turner as attempts toward asserting equality. The backlash from the Turner insurrection led to laws that became embedded in the ‘‘slave codes’’ as an attack on the remnants of African tribal life. ‘‘A wave of legislation passed over the South prohibiting the slaves from learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering with Negro religious meetings’’ (p. 98). When such social movements are framed as violent rebellions, attention is diverted from the violence that instituted and sustained slavery in the West. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociology of the Black Church and Religion supports Allison Calhoun-Brown’s central argument in ‘‘Upon This Rock’’ (1990) that the Black Church was the premiere black freedom movement in the United States while providing evidence of African Americans’ ability to self-govern. The acknowledgment of Sunday morning as the ‘‘most segregated hour of the week’’ testifies to one aspect of the condition of U.S. race relations and religious life. Such an expression ignores the contributing factors that led to near racially homogenous congregations. Voluntary racial clustering within the African American worship tradition safeguard a sacred heritage and exercise the collective will of self-determination. The Black Church of the period 1897 to 1914 resembled a syncretic religion as it embraced Christianity with a Calvinist creed and elements of Western African traditional spirituality. According to the author, most slaves in the United States came from parts of Africa that valued religious organization. 474 Reviews