Search Results

This chapter explores the origins and meaning of the phrase "the devil's music," paying particular attention to the way in which black southern blues performers, male and female, contest the term. Africa, through the mechanism of the slave trade and the condemnation of instrumental music by Islamic clerics, offers one possible origin for devil's music concept. The prelude to the demonization of the blues and its representative instrument, the steel-stringed guitar, is the evangelization of the slaves and the demonization of the fiddle during the second Great Revival. As blues emerged in the Mississippi Delta early in the Twentieth Century, blues musicians like John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and the Mississippi Sheiks, along with an irreverent "young modern" generation of black youth, mocked the hypocrisy of black ministers and spurned the religious certainties of their parents and the church.

This chapter discusses Mays' efforts to improve the professional education of black ministers. When Mays completed his Ph.D. course work at Chicago, Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, asked him to be the university's new dean of the School of Religion. This position gave him the opportunity to build a rigorous graduate program for the black clergy.

This chapter focuses on the first recorded devil blues song, Clara Smith's "Done Sold My Soul to the Devil" (1924). Public anxiety about the moral hazards experienced by black female migrants to the urban North offers one context for the song, but so does the rejection of Victorian morality by a transracial cohort of Lost Generation youth for whom the devil was an admirable figure rather than fear-inducing phantom: a master of the revels and instigator of "bad behavior" of the sort playfully chastised by Fats Waller in "There's Gonna Be the Devil to Pay." Couples dancing was a key issue: both black and white ministers condemned it, along with the "devil dance dens" in which it supposedly thrived, but blues singers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Sippie Wallace sang songs in which they partied with the devil—joyously in Rainey's case, uneasily in Wallace's.

This chapter examines the sociopolitical activism of black ministers from the South Central Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, particularly Earl Moore, Charles Joseph, and Charles E. Dudley Sr. It documents the opposition encountered by these ministers from white Adventist leaders and parishioners because of their involvement in the civil rights movement. It also shows how liberationist interpretations of the Bible, intellectual and theological justifications, and community awareness motivated these black Adventist ministers to engage in civil rights politics and how these factors trumped certain conservative elements within the church that its leaders used to discourage members from getting involved in sociopolitical activities.

This chapter examines the sociopolitical activism of black ministers from the South Atlantic and General Conferences of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, focusing on the experiences of Warren S. Banfield Jr. and Franklin Hill II of the South Atlantic Conference. It considers the extent to which some white Adventists opposed these ministers’ participation in the civil rights movement and looks at the efforts of Edward Earl Cleveland, a black Adventist evangelist and administrator with the General Conference, to bring about social change in the Southern Union and General Conferences. Finally, the chapter shows how these ministers were motivated by community awareness as well as intellectual and theological justifications to engage in sociopolitical activism.

This book examines the participation of Seventh-day Adventists in the civil rights movement in the United States and the extent to which the denomination’s theology influenced its members’ response to sociopolitical activism. It analyzes why some Adventists became involved in sociopolitical issues, while others did not. It looks at the factors that motivated Adventist activists to participate in civil rights politics, from community awareness or community-oriented consciousness to liberationist interpretations of the Bible, the example of early Adventist pioneers, and intellectual and theological reasons. Part 1 of the book explores the development of nonparticipatory politics in Adventism and how Southern violence, at the turn of the twentieth century, affected Adventist views on sociopolitical activity. Part 2 discusses the emergence of Afro-Adventist activism and the contribution of black Adventists such as Irene Morgan and Matthew Strachan to sociopolitical reform in the 1940s. It also highlights the sociopolitical activism of black ministers from the South Central Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, including Earl Moore, Charles E. Dudley Sr., and Charles Joseph.