Waning Light: The White Church, 19th Century African-American Literature and Abolitionist Discourse (abstract)
In the mid-nineteenth century, civil war and emancipation suddenly liberated hundreds of thousands of African Americans. As a result, a significant portion of the United States’ population sought social guidance. During a period of history in which “[t]he holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watch word beyond the old cry for freedom” (Souls, 13), the hierarchy of social institutions would forever change. The fight against oppression demanded discourse and the discussions would vary widely. By examining an archived religious tract from 1859 and explicating it alongside Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, we can begin to investigate the arguments concerning what Du Bois coined “the Negro problem” as it was debated in the white church. The repeated inability of the church to adequately provide the necessary leadership that the country sought emerges as a predominant theme that runs throughout not only abolitionist but also African American literature of the nineteenth century. The white church, as exemplified by Thome and portrayed by Du Bois, even if against slavery, refused to acknowledge the deeper-seeded, ideological changes necessary after emancipation in order to establish any semblance of equality in these United States of America. Unable to set the necessary precedent, which the situation demanded, the white church goes on to play only a subordinate role in African American literature.
