The emerging field of studies on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) grows each year. Scholars have examined these institutions’ histories and practices, their distinctive cultures and interactions with the larger society, and their notable alumni and contributions to the United States. Among these recent studies, however, few have examined the religious heritage of schools like Morehouse College, Wilberforce University, and Hampton University. Religion was an important aspect of the founding of many Black colleges and universities. Denominational groups—black and white—had a vested interest in the education of African Americans. Their labor and conflicts are the subject of Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s compelling and detailed book, Contentious Unions.
Mathews contributes to the body of scholarship on the sites of black higher education by revisiting the religious roots of three schools: Richmond Theological Institute, later Virginia Union University (Richmond, VA); Central City College, later Georgia Baptist College (Macon, GA); and the American Baptist Theological Seminary, later American Baptist College (Nashville, TN). Mathews argues that the funding these schools received from white donors was fraught with paternalistic motives and obligations, causing the black recipients of the money to negotiate the politics of the demands that came with it. These three schools were case studies of the larger dynamics between the competing visions that black and white religious leaders and organizations had for the administrations, curricula, and learning outcomes of the students. Mathews’s focus on the African American Baptist schools also adds to the work of notable denominational histories, for example, Leroy Fitts (1985) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1994). Yet little has been written about the ideological battles within these Baptist institutions since Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent in the early 1990s.
Mathews’s framing of the schools as “oppositional spaces” offers a useful lens for reading this history. The autonomy and democratic nature of Baptist polity would lead groups within the state Baptist conventions of Virginia and Georgia to split over the administrative ownership and direction of the schools. In Virginia, the Baptist conventions would split over such issues as the American Baptist Home Mission Society’s (ABHMS) refusal to integrate more graduates into the administration and faculty of the school and over the school’s curriculum. The eventual split led to the creation of a separate school in Lynchburg, Virginia Seminary, that was fully controlled by the Virginia Baptist State Convention (22). A similar situation occurred among the Georgia Baptists. Morehouse College, established by the ABHMS in Atlanta, would not satisfy the requests of members in the state Baptist convention for a school that African Americans could control. Central City College in Macon came into being in response to this goal. Their control of the school would eventually be complicated by changes in the school’s financial fortunes (162). American Baptist Theological Seminary, a school founded as a partnership between the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc. and the Southern Baptist Convention, would face its own challenges over funding, administrative direction, and theological orthodoxy.
Mathews lists the disputes that informed and challenged the work of the three schools. Matters such as choosing a curriculum presented moments of debate at each school. Virginia Union was the only school of the three that needed to petition for an African American president, a decision that came roughly seventy years after it opened. Each school resided in a segregated region of the country. Their relationships with their funding sponsors and surrounding communities often called for strategic approaches to race relations, with some methods being more direct than others.
Even as there is much to celebrate in Mathews’s book, the silence of the faculty and students in this story raises some questions. Although Mathews introduces Jelani Favors’s notion of a secondary curriculum, a nod to the schools’ tacit mission of creating race women and men, the reader knows little of how the students negotiated the expectations placed upon them from their white donors and sponsor organizations. Apart from a story of an appeal from the students of the American Baptist Seminary for a Black Studies curriculum around the 1970s (187), the students and faculty are mostly silent. Mathews seeks to fill some of the void by mining the memoirs of the students from these institutions who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. Joanne Gibson Robinson of Central City College helped lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama. C. T. Vivian and John Lewis (who became a member of Congress) from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville became prominent members of civil rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Mathews highlights the absence of the schools in their accounts. While this observation is an interesting point of reference, it does not replace the missing perspectives or opinions on the issues raised throughout the book.
Mathews’s approach to telling the story of the Black Baptists who supported, attended, taught, and/or led these institutions is laudable. Mathews is intentional about employing language that makes African American Baptists “the Baptists” of the narrative (13). In doing so, Mathews privileges their claim on the religious tradition. They are not an addendum to Baptist history. They are an important part of the Baptist story. The profiles of the people involved with these institutions, using the denominational minutes and professional correspondence, bring the reader closer to the frustrations of everyone involved. Mathews is also careful to tell the stories of African American women who attended these institutions. To be sure, Mathews presents an account that recovers important archival materials. They hold within them stories that trace the disparity in the power dynamics between the black college administrators and the white donors and sponsors that supported their institutions, and the skillful ways in which the administrators led their schools. With an extensive bibliography and index, Contentious Unions will appeal to the student and expert who finds interest in the subject matter.
