"Only a woman would do": Bible reading and African American Women's organizing work

Abstract

Sometimes, the best ideas for research come from others observing what you take for granted. One of my colleagues, a New Testament scholar, was summoned for jury duty in the large city where we both reside. When I inquired about the process of jury selection, he remarked: "You know, it makes for a boring day, but all of the African American women read their Bibles. At least they received something out of the long, boring day. Why do so many black women carry Bibles to read?" I gave a vague answer, but later I reconsidered the question. Why do African American women still read their Bibles, when so many popular magazines and self-help books target black women? What do they glean from the intense scrutiny of scripture? How did Bible reading become such a prevalent practice among African American women? The answer lies not so much in the present as in a shared past. During the late nineteenth century, African American women established strong networks for education and empowerment. Black Baptist women, some of whom later joined the Church of God in Christ, participated in Bible Bands, which were bible reading and study groups started by Joanna P. Moore, a white American Baptist home missionary who worked in the South after Reconstruction.1 These groups, sometimes led by "church mothers" with an eye to proper Bible exposition and home training, were started in 1884, according to Moore, in order to "commit to memory the word of God for our education and comfort, to teach it to others, and to supply the destitute with bibles."2 Bible Bands not only encouraged group study but also lent themselves to entrepreneurial endeavors, as black women sold Bibles, collected dues, and raised funds for missions. These groups provided African American women with a sacred space of their own, giving them some autonomy for their personal and collective spiritual lives, despite their marginalized status within the black church. In addition, Bible Bands often became the mainstay of women's church organization, providing an education in domestic duties and social activism.3 Most importantly, Bible Bands enabled women to pursue their spirituality in a realm primarily designed by and for women, even though men at times shared their study space.4 Although they are not womanist by prevailing contemporary definitions, Bible Band groups enabled women to acquire and practice organizational skills that they also used to serve their communities. The networks established through the Bible Band movement led them to advocacy and activism on behalf of women's concerns within their wider church denominations and, in some cases, helped to establish other women's organizations.5 Bible Band networks facilitated the expansion of autonomy, education, and entrepreneurial opportunity for African American women in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement allowed women to teach one another how to read, how to interpret scripture, and how to make a "Christian home." For black women like Lizzie Woods Robinson, the Bible Band "got her hands out of the washtub and on the Bible," enabling women like her to improve their educational and their social status.6 Most importantly, Bible Bands provided a framework for African American women's religious organizing that assisted in the formation of the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention and the Women's Work of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC).7 The biblical text became a lifeline, linking women in Bible Bands and eventually in women's convention groups to pursue shared goals of spirituality, personal uplift, and social improvement. Indeed, the zeal that Bible Band women brought to their organizing eventually caused controversy with men over the work of women's groups and their roles in the church. 8 Bible Bands offer a valuable lens through which to trace the development of the practice of regular Bible study among African American women and to examine the role of scripture in the promotion of reading literacy. Although many Protestant groups during this period introduced Sunday School literature and some sent missionaries to work among African Americans in the South after Reconstruction, the Bible Band system provided autonomy outside of the missionary/missionized relationship, which was almost unavoidably asymmetrical. In contrast to missionary activities and schools run by white people, missionaries within black church groups and communities organized and conducted Bible Bands independently. They were assisted in this endeavor by the national magazine Hope. Created by Moore specifically to provide daily lessons for use in Bible Band meetings, Hope became an effective text and mode of communication among African American women in the rural South. The magazine articulated commonplace nineteenth-century tropes of domesticity, piety, and the primacy of scripture, but it played a more dynamic role as a point of connection for women and missionary workers. Letters from African American women were published in Hope, generating a dialogue and support network across the region. Used in tandem with the Bible, Hope was an important tool in the promotion of literacy and community among African American women. Alternative educational opportunities like Bible Bands reached women in rural areas and in the lower socioeconomic classes who were unable to attend college, obtain secondary education, or even get access to enough formal schooling to become fluent readers and writers. Informal, community-based education was crucial to many black women living in regions where publicly funded educational facilities were absent or inferior and the black community's resources to support schooling were already stretched thin. Using a home study system with scripture married religion and literacy, allowing women to explore moral questions and social issues within their homes and with others from their own social location. Concerns about temperance, thrift, and racial uplift articulated by many middleclass African Americans were communicated to and upheld by those in more straitened circumstances. Impoverished women subscribed to the same ideals as their better-off and better-educated sisters and were able to achieve a measure of respectability.9 Their notion of respectability, however, found its locus and meaning in their belief in scripture and in putting its lessons into practice in their daily lives, rather than in imitating the demeanor and styles of the black middle class or seeking recognition from white people. 10 By upholding moral values based on scripture, these women furthered the goals of racial pride and uplift. The other unique aspect of African American Bible Bands was the interracial relationship that black women participants and activists forged with the white missionary Moore, which lasted from the late nineteenth century until her death in 1916. Virginia Broughton, a Holiness Baptist who was instrumental in the inception of the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention, and Lizzie Woods Robinson, a laundress who became the first overseer of women's work in the Church of God in Christ, played important roles in the dissemination of Hope magazine. The work of black women in the Bible Band movement and their friendship with Joanna Moore illuminate how black and white women in the South could find a common ground in Bible study. The Bible as a text helped people to navigate not only the minefield of race but also the differences that came with class and the complex contradictions of gender. The biblically based intersection of Moore's work with African American women in the South challenged the common conventions of Jim Crow and facilitated the building of an alternative structure for African American women's organizing work outside of the women's club movement. The Bible joined black women into a larger diasporan community linked to a sacred text that, like the talking book, held power and authority for the women who could wield it. © 2006 by The The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.