Convention speech — Chris Cameron: The Harlem Renaissance and Black secularism

This is the speech, edited for length, given by Chris Cameron at FFRF’s Scopes Centennial celebration in Chattanooga, Tenn., on July 19, 2025. He was introduced by comedian and convention emcee Leighann Lord. To watch the full speech, go to ffrf.org/scopescon.

Leighann Lord: Our next speaker is history professor Chris Cameron, who teaches at UNC Charlotte. His books include “The Abolitionist Movement: Documents Decoded,” “Early American History: Society, Politics and Culture” and “Black Freethinkers: A History of African-American Secularism.” He has co-edited several books, including “Race, Religion and Black Lives Matter.”

This Ph.D.-holding, marathon-running father of three is also pursuing a degree in French.

Please welcome Chris Cameron.

By Chris Cameron

Good morning, everyone. I’ll be speaking about the broader context of Black secularism during the period of the Scopes trial.

In the October 1925 issue of the AME Church Review, Rev. John W. Norris, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation in Baltimore, wrote, “The bible and evolution do not agree. They do not agree because the bible is a fact and evolution is not a fact.”

Rev. Norris conceded that Charles Darwin was a man of great mind, but he followed up by saying God was of greater mind. “God was unchangeable and all he made was unchangeable. Adam below the angels and above the lower orders of animal life.” Rev. Norris’ words are representative of mainstream Black thought in the United States in 1925.

An overwhelming majority of African Americans were evangelical Christians, primarily Methodists, Baptists and Pentecostals, and they by and large accepted the tenets of fundamentalism, including a belief in the bible as the only revealed word of God and a belief in the bible as infallible. And with this, African Americans largely rejected belief in Darwinian evolution.

While this was true of an overwhelming majority of African Americans in the early 20th century, not all rejected evolution. One month before Norris penned his article in September 1925, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote an editorial in The Crisis magazine, the organ of the NAACP, titled simply “Scopes.” Du Bois argued that “Dayton, Tenn., is America — a great, ignorant, simple-minded land, curiously compounded of brutality, bigotry, religious faith and demagoguery, and capable not simply of mistakes, but a persecution, lynching, murder and idiotic blundering.”

Du Bois would go on to make a clear connection between the fundamentalism that William Jennings Bryan and Rev. Norris espoused at the Scopes trial, and the persistence and growth of racism and racial violence in the United States.

By this point, Du Bois is one of, if not the most, important Black intellectuals of the 20th century, had been an agnostic and a socialist for about 30 years, dating back to his time studying abroad at the Free University of Berlin, during his doctoral program at Harvard. Du Bois left a teaching position at Atlanta University in 1910 to work for the NAACP, and immediately hatched the idea for The Crisis magazine, a periodical that would soon become his “agnostic pulpit,” according to one of his biographers.

The magazine was, in part, an expression of Du Bois’ notion of the Talented Tenth, an idea that posited that a small, educated group of Black leaders bore the responsibility for improving the plight of African Americans in the country. His conception of the Talented Tenth was a secular one that argued morality, culture, refinement and education were prerequisites for this leadership class. With few exceptions, including figures such as Alexander Crummell, Du Bois felt that these qualities were lacking from the Black church and most of its ministers.

Just two years after launching The Crisis, Du Bois published what was probably the harshest criticism of the Black church by an African American leader during the early 20th century. His 1912 article “The Negro Church” admitted that the institution had some utility in teaching morals, promoting stable family life, and developing business acumen within the Black community.

But for Du Bois, Black churches in the country were lacking in significant ways. First, there were too few good and learned men leading the church.

Second, perhaps most problematic of all, in his view, was the constant building of new and elaborate churches when Black people all over the country were still without homes and schools. Du Bois did not reserve his animus for Black churches alone, as he used The Crisis to inveigh against American Christianity more broadly.

One year after his editorial on the Black Church, he published “The Church and the Negro,” where he noted that from the Colonial Era, Christian churches aided and abetted the Negro slave trade. “This church was the bulwark of American slavery, and the church today is the strongest seat of racial and color prejudice.” Du Bois developed these arguments in a 1929 Crisis essay entitled “The Color Line and the Church,” where he began by noting “the American Church of Christ is Jim Crow’d from top to bottom. No other institution in America is built as thoroughly or more absolutely on the color line.”

The central crisis faced by American Christians was whether churches wanted to continue to proclaim their divine origin and foundation in supernatural power, or whether the church must acknowledge itself to be a human organization largely composed of the rich and respectable, desirous of better things, and groping for social uplift, but restrained by inherited prejudice, economic privilege and social fear.

In Du Bois’ view, it was clear that the church was choosing the latter alternative, and this choice marked it as “a deliberate hypocrite and systematic liar.

Clarence Darrow’s article for The Crisis in 1931 actually drew the ire of Black newspapers around the country because they were angry at both his and Du Bois’ critique of the church and its ministers. The Crisis magazine also became a central component of the Harlem Renaissance, one of the most important artistic and intellectual movements in African American and American history.

As editor, Du Bois published some of the earliest works of famed writers such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Indeed, Hughes’ most famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” was first published in the June 1921 edition of The Crisis. In giving space to these authors and their work, Du Bois became one of the most important facilitators of the Harlem Renaissance, which, in turn, helped contribute to a sharp growth in African-American secularism during the 1920s.

So, what was behind this growth in Black secularism? One of the most important factors was the Great Migration of the early 20th century, in which the outbreak of World War I played a critical part. During the war, which lasted from 1914 to 1919, European immigration to the United States declined drastically, going from 1.2 million immigrants in 1914 to 327,000 the following year, and dropping even further to 110,000 in 1918.

At the same time, 4 million Americans were conscripted for service in the military, the overwhelming majority of whom were white, leading to massive labor shortages, especially in the North. This situation pushed Northern businessmen to look to white women and Black Southerners to fill their labor needs.

With the prevalence of sharecropping, a system that kept African Americans in perpetual debt, and the reinvigoration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1910s, Black Southerners decided to migrate in mass to Northern cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and New York. Just during World War I, from 1916 and 1919, approximately half a million Black Southerners moved north, while another million followed suit during the 1920s.

While the Great Migration did foster a vibrant religious life among many African Americans in the North, the literary and intellectual movement that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance also paved the way for a more widespread freethought movement. Historian David Levering Lewis notes that the Harlem Renaissance was “a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations in a time of extreme national backlash.”

The national backlash to which Lewis refers took off during the so-called Red Summer of 1919. Black soldiers came home from World War I, where 325,000 of them had served with great expectations, but found that they had to fight just as hard, if not harder, for democracy in the United States. During this summer of 1919, race riots erupted in 26 cities and 76 African Americans were lynched, including 10 uniformed soldiers.

Often, racist mobs would be waiting at train stations to strip the military uniforms off the bodies of African Americans. With the return to a peacetime economy, Black workers throughout the country were expelled from labor unions, as well. These factors dissuaded many Blacks from engaging directly in political radicalism, but they also led to the rise of a cultural politics that would play an important role in the Black freedom struggle of the 20th century.

The New Negro Renaissance provided fertile ground for the spread of Black freethought. Once the movement began, Harlem in particular, and New York City more broadly, became an attractive place for intellectuals and writers of all stripes. This situation, as well as the urbanization and industrialization prevalent in early 20th century America, had significant implications for religious belief. For one, man-made structures now towered over nature and God’s so-called creation, diminishing their importance in the eyes of many.

Also, as James Turner points out, “Once the nation became more urban, bible stories built from the metaphors and folkways of a pastoral and agrarian people lost their immediate emotional resonance.”

One of the principal figures of the Harlem Renaissance to embrace freethought was Langston Hughes. Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo., in 1902, but spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kan. With his father and mother separated and the latter often traveling to find work, Hughes went to live with his grandmother early on, in addition to spending stretches of time at two relatives’ house — James and Mary Reed.

It was while living with Auntie and Uncle Reed, as Hughes called them, that he first developed a fascination with Black religion, but also a distaste for church and eventual rejection of belief in Jesus. Auntie Reed ran the Sunday School at Saint Luke’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Lawrence, and while Langston was living with her, she demanded he attend the school every week.

He was not a fan of this requirement, and noted that he came to loathe church after Auntie Reed made him stay inside on a beautiful spring day and memorize bible verses while other kids played. It was after a revival service Hughes attended at the age of 13 that he came to disbelieve in God.

Just as he himself had futilely tried to pray to Jesus, he notes that millions of African Americans engage in the same practice with the same results. His critique of African American religion in this poem also displays his political consciousness and growing belief in secular humanism. “If Jesus cannot protect Black people, then Black people must take action to protect themselves.”

One of Hughes’ close friends in Harlem, at least until their falling out in the early 1930s, was Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who likewise embraced secularism and freethought over the Black church.

Both Hughes and Hurston were featured in Alain Locke’s 1925 compilation “The New Negro,” which is still seen as the principal text of the Harlem Renaissance, and both would prominently feature the voices and lives of ordinary Black people in their work, sort of pushing back against this notion of the Talented Tenth. Hurston was born in Notasulga, Ala., in 1891 and would relocate to Eatonville, Fla., a prosperous Black town, as a toddler.

Her father was a minister at the Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville, so she had a lot of religious exposure and education during her youth. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, she began to question the central tenets of Christianity at a fairly young age.

These questions speak to one of the central questions that many Black freethinkers would pose throughout the 20th century: God is all-knowing and all-powerful. Why are there so many problems in the world? Why is there racism? Why can’t a loving and all-powerful God foresee these and head them off before they even begin?

Like many other Black freethinkers, Hurston feared rejection by our community for doubting the tenets of Christianity. “When I was asked if I loved God,” she notes, “I always said yes because I knew that was the thing I was supposed to say. It was a guilty secret with me for a long time.”

Being a preacher’s daughter, Hurston had to attend church regularly and even came to love the drama and excitement of testimonials, revivals and other elements of the conversion process. She was able to put her questions aside for a while, but the doubts would resurface when she began studying history and philosophy at Barnard College in New York City during the mid-1920s.

When she read history, she learned that Christianity was not always spread through revivals and good preaching, as it often was in Eatonville, but rather through the sword. In short order, she would embrace an idea articulated by Ludwig Flora Park in his 1841 book “The Essence of Christianity,” namely, “that our ideas of God are merely reflections of our own hopes and desires.”

“People need religion because a great mass is for your life and its consequence,” she wrote. “Its responsibilities weigh heavy feeling, a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with an omnipotence to bolster up their feelings of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds.”

She never articulated an atheist position, but her ideas about God in prayer show her to be a deist.

“As for me,” she notes, “I do not pretend to read God’s mind if he has a plan for the universe worked out to the smallest detail. It would be folly for me to presume to get down on my knees and attempt to revise it, so I do not pray. I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny.”

Along with deism, we might call Hurston a humanocentric theist, to use a term from the philosopher William R. Jones’ 1972 book, “Is God a White Racist?” Humanocentric theists generally posit a belief in God, while also believing that God has no practical impact on human life, and that any change for good or ill on Earth must come from humans themselves.

This position, for all intents and purposes, is very similar to the 18th-century deist belief that a clockmaker God created the world and allows it to run according to natural laws. Along with Hurston, Nella Larsen was another well-known female writer of the Harlem Renaissance that would explore secular themes in her fictional work.

Larsen’s literary acclaim helped to establish the novel as a creative form for new Negro writers. And, her success focused attention on women as literary artists and a cultural movement of highly visible men, most of whom initially wrote poetry or short fiction. Larsen was born the same year as Hurston in 1891, and spent most of her youth in Chicago before leaving to attend Fisk University in 1907.

After graduating, she moved to New York City to train as a nurse, went back down South to work at Tuskegee for a year, and then moved back to New York City in 1916, where she married a physicist named Elmer Samuel Imes. She soon began writing and published her first essay in “The Brownie’s Book” in 1920. It was after quitting her job as a nurse and taking a position as a library assistant at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, now the famed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, that her career as a writer began to gain steam.

She would publish her first novel, “Quicksand,” in 1928, a novel that was unique in a number of ways, not least of which is its treatment of religion and sexuality. The central character in the novel is a woman named Helga Crane, and the story begins with her articulating her dissatisfaction with Naxos, a school that was a composite of Fisk and Tuskegee universities and an anagram of Saxon.

Helga soon leaves to return to her hometown of Chicago. She’s unable to find work there, so she travels to Harlem, where she stays for a few months. She has a number of different travels, ends up back in Harlem a couple of years later, where she is spurned by the former principal of Naxos and makes a very rash decision to marry a revival preacher she had met just the night before from Alabama named Rev. Mr. Pleasant Green.

Helga moved to Alabama with Greene and quickly adapted to life as a preacher’s wife, starting a sewing circle, attempting to help other women, and having children in quick succession. In a 20-month period, she had three children, a set of twin boys and a girl, and after having a fourth child, she became incredibly sick and was confined to her bed for weeks.

Larsen writes that during Helga’s sickness, “She had learned what passion and credulity could do to one. In her was born angry bitterness and enormous disgust. The cruel, unrelieved suffering had beaten down her protective wall of artificial faith in the infinite wisdom, in the mercy of God. For had she not called in her agony on him, and he had not heard, why? Because she knew he wasn’t there, didn’t exist.”

Here we see a similar theme that Hughes mentions in his autobiography, namely the inability or unwillingness of God to respond to the problems of human beings. Larsen likewise picked up on another theme Hughes would mention, the idea that perhaps if there was a God, he only cared about white people.

“With the obscuring curtain of religion rent,” Larson writes of Helga: “she was able to look about her and see with shocked eyes this thing that she had done to herself. She couldn’t, she thought ironically, even blame God for it, now that she knew he didn’t exist. No. No more than she could pray to him for the death of her husband, the Rev. Mr. Pleasant Greene. The white man’s God. And, his great love for all people, regardless of race. What idiotic nonsense she had allowed herself to believe. How could she? How could anyone have been so deluded? How could 10 million Black folk credited when daily before their eyes was enacted its contradiction?”

This final question is one that would recur throughout the history of 20th and early 21st century African American secularism, namely: Why would Black people believe in a God that does not seem to care about them?

In addition to its influence on the Harlem Renaissance, secularism would inform African Americans’ participation in the communist and labor movements of the 1920s and 1930s, the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, Black theology, Black feminism and a host of other social and political endeavors over the past 30 years. While it has not reached the numeric strength of monotheistic religious traditions, secularism and freethought have informed the ideology and worldview of a significant and growing segment of Black America, and is poised to wield even greater importance in the years to come, as younger African Americans are increasingly rejecting identification with the historic Black church and embracing secular alternatives.

Thank you.