Ransom, Reverdy C. 1861-1959

RANSOM, REVERDY C. 1861-1959

Bishop, african methodist episcopal church

The Other Social Gospel

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked in American religion by the rise of a movement called the Social Gospel among Protestant clergy. Men such as Josiah Strong, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Washington Gladden developed the idea of the church as a social force helping to ameliorate the difficult living conditions of urban immigrants as well as supporting nascent labor movements. Less well remembered and studied were the Social Gospel thinkers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In fact, critics often point to the lack of awareness of race issues on the part of white Social Gospel theologians. Reverdy Cassius Ransom, however, a black African Methodist Episcopal pastor and strong voice for equality in America, had a remarkable career as a pastor, Social Gospel activist, black rights activist, editor, and eventually bishop in his church. He ranked among the major voices and activists in the 1910s for the black churches and people.

Formative Years

Reverdy Ransom was born in Flushing, Ohio, in 1861. His mother, Harriet Johnson, would be a major influence on his thinking as well as his early career. He never knew his father but took the name of Ransom after his stepfather, whom his mother married shortly after his birth. Ransom was raised primarily in Cambridge, Ohio, where the African Methodist Episcopal Church was a major force in the lives of blacks. Ransom, barred from white schools, was educated in AME churches, which provided space in which public schools for blacks could operate. His mother attempted to enroll him in a white public school more than once but each time was rebuffed. She insisted that he be educated, however, and began performing extra work in order to pay white tutors to teach Reverdy privately. In 1881 Harriet Ransom mortgaged her home in order to send Ransom to Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. He officially joined the AME Church that year. The following year he transferred, with the help of a small scholarship, to the famous Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Ransom admitted in his autobiography that he did not yet trust black institutions like Wilberforce to provide for his education. At Oberlin, however, a school noted for its liberalism, he found segregation and had his scholarship with-drawn after he organized a protest. He returned to Wilberforce where he completed his B.A. in 1886. He had seen the importance of black institutions. Men such as Daniel Payne and sociologist Benjamin W. Arnett (later an AME bishop and an adviser to President William McKinley), both professors at Wilberforce, became major influences on his thought during these years. Ransom was singled out as a gifted orator, earned a license to preach, and became the pastor of an AME Church in Selma, Ohio, in 1885. He was ordained in 1886.

Pastor and Social Gospeler

The first ten years of Ransom's career as a pastor were spent in smaller cities, as he developed his Social Gospel thinking. He held pastorates in Altoona and Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania (1886-1888); Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (1888-1890); Springfield, Ohio (1890-1893); and Cleveland, Ohio (1893-1896). Ransom was married in 1881 but divorced in 1886. He then married a second time in 1887, a union that lasted fifty-four years, and he began his early work as an advocate of the Social Gospel. In 1890 he organized a Men's Club in Springfield, the first such club in the AME Church. In Cleveland he became a supporter of women deaconesses and organized the first AME board of deaconesses. In 1893 he attended the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago with Arnett, where he was exposed to ecumenical ideas in religion. He would, throughout his life, support the unification of the AME Church and the AME Zion Church, though he would be disappointed that it never occurred. The 1890s saw the beginning of the great black migration from the rural South to the urban North. Though the migration would not really explode until after World War I, Ransom recognized early on the social conditions that would block the progress of urban blacks, and that the church could not confront alone. He saw the need for social institutions, not simply religious ones, in urban centers.

Chicago

In 1896 Ransom, who had been remarkably successful as an orator, organizer, and leader in his previous pastorates, was assigned by Bishop Arnett to the Bethel AME Church in Chicago, America's second largest city. Ransom's boldest social initiatives as a pastor would take place in Chicago, making him a well-known thinker as well as a preacher. With Jane Addams's Hull House and through friendships with Social Gospeler Frank Gunsaulus and lawyer Clarence Darrow, Ransom would begin to attack directly the new problems of the urban poor, much to the dismay of other AME pastors in the city. In 1900 he formed the Institutional Church and Social Settlement (ICSS), a kind of Hull House for Chicago's black community and the first settlement house in the country owned and operated by African Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois called it the "most advanced step in the direction of making the church exist for the people rather than the people for the church." The ICSS offered among its services day care for the children of working mothers, a gymnasium, various classes in practical crafts as well as music, men's clubs, women's clubs, Bible study groups, and an employment bureau. But Ransom faced opposition. Many AME pastors challenged Ransom's views of the church and resented his popularity as a preacher. At one point he was banned from preaching on Sunday mornings because other preachers feared losing their regular congregations. Others challenged the ICSS because they feared it would displace the emphasis on the spiritual In 1904 Ransom left Chicago, and the ICSS was returned to being a "normal" AME Church, with religion as its emphasis.

Niagara

Ransom moved to Massachusetts in 1904, working in New Bedford for two years before becoming pastor of the prestigious Charles Street AME Church in 1905. The early years of the twentieth century saw a debate among blacks between the popular and powerful Booker T. Washington and his "conservative" approach to racial and social questions and the more "radical" groups led by Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. Ransom was among the radicals, and in 1906 he attended the second annual meeting of the Niagara Movement, which had been formed a year earlier. Ransom gave his famous speech "The Spirit of John Brown" at the conference in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a speech that Du Bois would later claim was the driving force behind the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, organized in 1909 and founded in 1910. In the speech Ransom outlined both the conservative and radical viewpoints of the ongoing debate with Washington but then called for action, saying that "the Negro should assert his full title to American manhood, and maintain every right guaranteed him by the Constitution of the United States." J. Max Barber, editor of the Voice of the Negro, called it "the most eloquent address this writer has ever listened to." Ransom also spoke at the founding meeting of the NAACP, presenting the group's case for active protest, particularly against the epidemic of lynchings and race riots in the early twentieth century. In the mean-time Ransom had left Boston in 1907 for his final pastorate in New York City, which he would keep until 1912.

Editor

In 1912 Ransom became the editor of the AME Review. His twenty-six years as an active pastor were over, and he moved into the realm of politics and writing. He became involved in presidential politics, influencing the black vote in the elections of 1912, 1916, and 1920. In 1912 he supported but then withdrew from Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt, switching to Democrat Woodrow Wilson instead after Roosevelt slighted black southern delegates. But after Wilson continued segregation in government offices (which had begun under Taft) and did nothing to stop the problem of lynching, Ransom, feeling betrayed, returned to the Republican Party (the party of Abraham Lincoln) in 1916 and 1920. He did not believe in the party but saw no other alternative. He continued his social work during the decade by forming the Church of Simon of Cyrene in New York, a mission created to minister to Manhattan's poor black community. The AME Review expanded its outlook and coverage of events under Ransom's guidance through the 1910s. Major voices such as William Monroe Trotter, Booker T. Washington, Kelly Miller, W. S. Scarborough, and Fenton Johnson published in the Review, while Ransom used his editorials as a place to address injustices to the African American community as well as discuss church-related issues.

Bishop

In 1924 Ransom was made a bishop of AME Church. He was sixty-three years old and would live another thirty-five years, continuing his role as church leader and spokesman for American blacks. He served over the years as bishop for three separate districts covering Kentucky and Tennessee (1924-1932) and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia (1932-1952) and was a delegate to the World Methodist Conference in Massachusetts in 1947. He served as the president of Wilberforce's Board of Trustees from 1932 to 1948 and was the first president of the National Fraternal Council of Negro Churches. Among his books were The Spirit of Freedom and Justice: Orations and Speeches (1926), The Negro: The Hope or Despair of Christianity (1935), The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom's Son (1949), and Preface to History of the AME Church (1950). He died in 1959 at the age of ninety-eight, one of the most important voices and religious leaders of the first half of the twentieth century.

Source:

Calvin S. Morris, Reverdy C. Ransom: Black Advocate of the Social Gospei (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990).