First and most importantly, Tongues of Fire is an invaluable collection of sermons, editorials, notes, and letters from more than forty ministers (and a few assorted notable others, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett) of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the so-called nadir of post-Civil War African American history. As segregation and disfranchisement laws swept through southern legislatures and constitutional conventions, and ostensibly legal (the rise of the prison-convict-labor industrial complex) as well as extralegal acts of violence (i.e., lynchings, whitecappings, etc.) reinforced an order of strict racialized hierarchy, Black church people responded. Aaron Treadwell credits the “resistance ideology” developed during slavery with providing a basis for post-Civil War sermonizing (2).
These are the kinds of printed sermons and letters—often originally appearing in the Christian Recorder, the main publication of the AME church and an indispensable source of nineteenth-century African American historical documentation—that those of us who researched in the pre-digital age used to spend countless hours scrolling through microfilm looking to find. I am happy to trade those days for digitized collections and, even better, for this wonderfully organized and carefully analyzed compilation of such sources, which date from 1877 to 1919. Treadwell’s assiduous labors provide us not only with a documentary collection but also with an acutely analyzed three-part division of the material. Generally labeled under the heading “theological protectionism,” Treadwell divides that category further into “radical,” “pious,” and “constitutional” theological protectionism. The first derives most directly from what the historian Gary Dorrien has referred to as the Black Social Gospel tradition: “Preachers in this group believed that obedience to God warrants salvation and liberation,” Treadwell writes (6). The second emphasizes more a “moral cleansing of Black communities, including the condemnation of vices,” assuming that bringing more Black people up to standards of respectability would reduce the excuse of lynching (7). The third—constitutional theology—continues the Henry McNeal Turner/Frederick Douglass/Ida B. Wells-Barnett/Reconstruction era tradition of deploying Black churches for political organizing. Treadwell explains that “safety required political action and the development of an emancipation ethos within the Black church structure” (7).
The result was a variegated set of responses, some of which certainly could be called “tongues of fire,” as the title has it here, others perhaps something else. At any rate, the fire was often modulated, turned down, in part as a plea from ministers to Black communities to police their own behavior and inculcate morality and respectability. That stratagem, not to put too fine a point on it, led nowhere, given that white vigilantes often targeted those in Black communities who aspired to economic progress, including the three young men lynched in Memphis, from which Wells-Barnett first gained her fame as a journalist. (Her reprinted essays in this volume remain brilliant examples of the best exposé journalism of that era.) Included as well are those who advocated for emigration to Africa (as did, most famously, Henry McNeal Turner), and those who insisted that the United States was their true home. Included also is Turner’s famous short piece, “Negroes, Get Guns!” Sometimes the protectionism came less from theology than from the simple possession of firearms. “God give you good aim when you shoot,” Turner hoped (29). The Atlanta Riot of 1906 brought forth a memorable oration from Reverdy Ransom delivered at Faneuil Hall in Boston, in which he concluded simply that “This American butchery is without palliation or excuse” (40). Ransom connected his resistance theology (at a speech to the newly formed Niagara Movement in 1906) to the spirit of Socrates, Jesus, Savonarola, and John Brown: “the principles they advocated, and the truths they taught, have become the richest and most glorious heritage of mankind” (55).
Throughout the book, specific cases of lynching are detailed and contextualized by the editor, before responses are reprinted, allowing readers to appreciate fully the context in which the writings were produced. Some of them (such as Sam Hose) are well known; many are not, and in many cases, the very act of going to discover what precisely had happened in individual cases put the authors themselves in danger. Numerous editorialists expressed bewilderment at the nearly complete silence of white ministers on the barbaric acts; little did some of the editorialists know how much white churches helped to organize, or at least participated in, the astonishing explosion of cruelty witnessed in the era, as we have learned from the scholarship of Amy Louise Wood and others. Aside from Turner and Wells-Barnett, few in this compilation ever fully grasped the depth of racialized theology that had engulfed white Christianity in the South. Even with all the scholarship about it since then, it still makes for a dark study.
Scholars, teachers, and researchers are much in Treadwell’s debt for this one-of-a-kind compilation of sources. The tongues here, whether set to full fire or to a more moderate temperature, are crucial sources to understand one of the darkest chapters of American history, from a variety of Black theological perspectives. There is nothing else like it, and it should shape scholarly study for decades to come.
