Torberg-Penn is not the only scholar who minimizes religion’s significance in the development of African American culture. In Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Kevin Gaines took a similar tack. Examining the intellectual leaders of the African American community in the early decades of the twentieth century, he argued that black elites, as both an aspiring social class and a racially subordinated caste denied all political rights and protections, struggled to define themselves within a society founded on white dominance, offering a profound understanding of the historical nexus of race, class, national and sectional politics, and black leadership in our society.
Gaines’s began by sketching the “sociopolitical and cultural contexts of racial uplift ideology.â€? As African Americans lost their political power after the Reconstruction, they were virtually re-enslaved. Under such conditions, the meanings prescribed to uplift changed rather often. One of the events that caused a major redefinition of uplift ideology was the Atlanta riot of 1906, the culmination of the daily humiliations of Jim Crow. In the face of such humiliations, black elites determined that they needed to lift up the lower classes of their race. In the remainder of the book, he examined several of the various ways that black intellectuals sought to uplift the race. From William H. Ferris to Anna Julia Cooper to W. E. B. Du Bois to Paul Laurence Dunbar to James D. Corrothers to Alice Dunbar-Nelson to Hubert H. Harrison, Gaines illustrated how members of the black middle class struggled “to reconcile racial uplift ideology’s ideals with changing social realities,â€? moving ever closer to black nationalism. Through this evolution of meaning, Gaines contented that racial uplift ideology in the early twentieth century was inherently contradictory, perpetuating racism and patriarchalism. In the end, he advocated gleaning the best things that racial uplift ideology had to offer, namely “compassion, service, education, and a commitment to social and economic justice for all citizens.â€?
If Torberg-Penn can be forgiven for only devoting a paragraph to the influence of religion on African American culture, Gaines’s failure cannot be so easily overlooked. In his entire analysis of uplift ideology, he never mentioned religion. In light of works like Higginbotham’s on black Baptists and racial uplift, one wonders how he could fail at least to mention some connection. Even though his subjects might have worked primarily in the secular world, they at the very least used religious rhetoric as a means of uplift. This was certainly the case with W. E. B. Du Bois. Gaines, in short, seemingly ignored the influences of religion on ideologies of racial uplift.
Still, Uplifting the Race is an extremely valuable volume. Gaines’s treatment of the themes he did focus on is superb. Perhaps the most important theme investigated by Gaines was that of black nationalism. Similar to the argument of Torberg-Penn, Gaines asserted that “black nationalism, that dominant Anglo-American nationalism, was intensely concerned with gender issues and illustrates the affinity between black and white anxieties surrounding racial purity, intermarriage, paternity, and the reproductive sexuality of black and white women.â€? All in all, he demonstrated convincingly that during the early twentieth century racial uplift ideology evolved toward a concept of black nationalism.