Grimke, Du Bois, Woodson

Question 1

American Negro Academy

Answer 1

1. 1897
2. Grimke, Du Bois, Wright, Crummell
3. supported AfAm academic scholarship, encouraged classical academic studies and liberal arts
4. Talented Tenth

Question 2

Niagara Movement

Answer 2

1. 1905
2. Du Bois, Grimke, Ransom, Wright
3. called for opposition to racial segregation and disenfranchisement, opposed to policies of accommodation and conciliation
4. predecessor of Niagara Movement

Question 3

Grimke, “Afro-American Pulpit in Relation to Race Elevation” (1892)

Answer 3

1. importance of Christian character
2. Christian ministry responsible for strengthening and developing individual character
3. criticism against black preachers: emotionalism frivolity, and greed for money

Question 4

Grimke, “God and Prayer as Factors of Struggle”

Answer 4

1. reasons to be hopeful for brighter future for blacks
   (a) defence of rights (b) progress in wealth and education (c) power of Christianity
2. God as source of hope: Moses
3. power of prayer: Moses and burning bush
4. whites and blacks with same faults in different contexts
5. objective in preaching sermons

Question 5

Grimke, “God and the Race Problem” (1903)

Answer 5

1. poor representation of blacks in press causing race to lose friends
2. circular: state of crisis, designate day of fasting and prayer
3. no white is friend if they deny equality of black as man
4. God as source of power

Question 6

Grimke, “Christianity and Race Prejudice” (1910)

Answer 6

1. Gospel of John: Jesus and Samaritan similar to AfAms
2. characterises race prejudice
3. outlines Christianity
4. concludes race prejudice contrary to every known principle of Christianity

Question 7

Grimke, “The Race Problem as it Respects the Coloured People…” (1919)

Answer 7

1. things to be thankful for
2. AfAm rights imperfectly recognised
3. things AfAm should be thankful for
4. address from FCCC

Question 8

Bio Fannie Williams

Answer 8

1. grew up in NY as high-status woman
2. active among Chicago reformers
3. NACW and NAACP

Question 9

Bio Francis Grimke

Answer 9

1. son of white plantation owner and mixed race slave
2. bequeathed to half-brother and lived as slave
3. escaped during Civil War
4. minister of 15th Street Presbyterian Church
5. prided himself on fulfilling Presbyterian ideal of educated minister
6. high view of Scripture
   7.

Question 10

Edward Blum

Answer 10

1. Northern Protestant Christianity helped forge a new sense of white American nationalism following the Civil War that authorised the segregation of African Americans and their political disenfranchisement
2. contributed to the creation of a national white image in which racist understandings were recreated into a more coherent ideological system
3. thus N white churchmen took an active part in segregation
4. part of a wider historiographical trend that attempts to decentralise the South

Question 11

Key Ideas of Woodson

Answer 11

1. education and increasing social and professional contacts among blacks and whites would reduce racism (promoted Association for Study of Negro Life and History partly for this purpose)
2. diagnosis of Black Church: suffered generational divide, regional divide, and class divide, as well as divisions in ideas about importance of church in community
3. highly critical of black preachers
4. HOWEVER credited church as doing some good, and deflected some criticisms onto white Christianity

Question 12

Bio Woodson

Answer 12

1912: second AfAm to attain PhD from Harvard
1915: established Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (“father of black history”)
1916: established The Journal of Black History
regular columnist for UNIA’s Negro World
1926: launched celebration of “Negro History Week”
1930: published the Rural Negro

Question 13

Woodson and rural black church

Answer 13

1. offered portrait of religious culture of black “peasantry” or rural South
2. concluded urban church had become “a sort of uplift agency” but rural church remained “a mystic shrine”
3. 1900s: decline of rural Am troubled church leaders, increasing emigration to urban areas

Question 14

Woodson, “Things of Spirit”

Answer 14

1. rural preacher: able to find sufficient following despite lack of education, generally moral (crimes of few tarnish reputation of all), more bad preachers in cities
2. poor quality of black preachers in rural communities meant little progress beyond status of reconstruction or antebellum days
3. urban church as “uplift agency” seeks to make present world better
4. rural church as “mystic shrine” preparation for heaven
5. revival assemblies of July and August