Living the Social Gospel in Early Twentieth-Century America

Beginning with the presidency of George Gates (1851-1912), Grinnell College became identified with the "social gospel," an activist view of Christianity that rejected economic, social, and racial inequality. Students of the "social gospel" have made much of its emphasis upon economic and social inequality, but Grinnell proponents like George D. Herron (1862-1925) and Edward A. Steiner (1866-1956) did not neglect to attack the racism that post-Reconstruction America imposed upon Black men and women. Herron, for example, excoriated a world which "a race turned into freedom almost worse than slavery because of the shameful irresponsibility of the nation enslaving it." 

1890s Portrait of George D. Herron
(https://digital.grinnell.edu/islandora/object/grinnell%3A18334)

After leaving Grinnell, Herron aligned himself with the Social Democratic Party of Eugene Debs whose platform called wage earners to organize "without distinction of color, race, or sex" (Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991], 83, 201). Steiner, who succeeded Herron in the Chair of Applied Christianity at Grinnell, also rejected racial distinctions. "I teach one religious doctrine," Steiner said, "...that underneath all the differences in races and classes, humanity is essentially one" (ibid., 253).

1920s Portrait of Edward Steiner
(https://digital.grinnell.edu/islandora/object/grinnell%3A18367)

But what impact did these activists have upon students at Grinnell College where an all-white faculty and administration welcomed almost no Black students to campus? The College graduated in these years numerous well-known activists like Harry Hopkins (1912), Hallie Flanagan Davis (1911), Chester Davis (1911), and Forence Stewart Kerr (1912), all influenced by Grinnell's commitment to the Social Gospel.

None of these alums, as accomplished as they might have been, devoted their careers to undoing American racial injustice. Bessie K. Meacham (1883-1975), however, having integrated the lessons of the Social Gospel into her Christianity, devoted her life to Black men and women across the U.S. South. Beginning immediately after her 1911 commencement at Grinnell, Meacham accepted appointment to "Negro" schools supported and staffed by the American Missionary Association (hereafter AMA). If it was sometimes hard on her and her health—in addition to occasional spells of sickness, she spent the academic year 1914-15 in Grinnell, trying to recover her health (Marshalltown Evening Times-Republican 9/8/1914)—Meacham nevertheless committed herself to the education of poor Blacks who had to live with Jim Crow and the often violent consequences of racial hatred in the American South. Today's post reports on how Bessie Meacham used her life to contribute to the education of Black youth in the US South.

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Dudley A. Meacham (1855-1914) was a Washington County farmer who, with his wife Harriett (1860-1948), raised three children: Bessie Katherine, the subject of today's post; Frank (1890-1960), who pursued a theological education and eventually served many years as a missionary in what was then Rhodesia; and Floy (1895-1989). After having farmed for several decades, sometime around 1905 Dudley Meacham brought his family to Grinnell, purchasing a home at 1006 Chatterton. In Grinnell Dudley abandoned farming, perhaps because of the illness that brought him an early death: Meacham told the 1910 census-taker that he was then a janitor in a public building. Whatever the move meant for Dudley Meacham's health, the move to Grinnell certainly proved important to his children, since both Bessie and Frank attended and graduated from Grinnell College where they came under the influence of the Social Gospel.

2023 Photo of 1006 Chatterton, Grinnell, IA

Bessie Meacham, the couple's oldest child, was the first to follow this path. Having previously attended Washington Academy (Washington Evening Journal 3/17/1904), Bessie enrolled at the Iowa College Academy shortly after the Meacham family moved to Grinnell. She graduated from the Academy in 1907 (GH 6/4/1907) and immediately thereafter matriculated at the college. 

Considerably older than most of her classmates, Bessie Meacham brought to Grinnell College a deep commitment to Christianity and long experience with Christian Endeavor (C. E.), a late-nineteenth-century ministry that attempted to engage Christian youth with an evangelizing mission. Like others in the organization, Meacham will have recited C.E.'s pledge that obliged members to practice daily devotions and encouraged them to pursue a career that Christ would have them follow. Like her fellow C. E. enthusiasts, Meacham promised "throughout my whole life...to lead a Christian life." At the 1915 convention of the district C. E. organization convened in Grinnell, Meacham was one of two youth to offer ten-minute talks on the pledge. Esther Bliss spoke to how the pledge "helps our inner life" while Meacham, leaning on her Grinnell College education and its commitment to the Social Gospel, explained how the pledge "helps our society" (GH 5/14/1915).

Exactly how did Meacham think that her C.E. pledge would help society? Meacham's college yearbook portrait indicates that she foresaw a career in missions that would fulfill her Christian ambitions. Alongside the graduate's photograph is a pencil drawing of a shield, with a bold "CE" occupying the very center, confirming Meacham's membership in the organization. It was not, however, the only organization to which she belonged. Also inscribed on the shield is the name Student Volunteer Band, "an organization of those who have formed the purpose of spending their future in Foreign Missions and are now engaged in furthering missionary interest among students" (1911 Cyclone). 

Grinnell College Student Volunteer Band; Meacham, 2nd row, far right
(1911 Cyclone)

More than personal redemption, however, Meacham's Christianity importantly embraced racial justice. During Meacham's four years at Grinnell there was on campus only one Black student, James Owen Redmon GC 1913, who had been brought to the college through the personal intervention of Edward Steiner. Despite the rarity of Blacks on the Grinnell campus, Meacham developed a vision for young Black men and women, and Redmon had a part in developing that vision. 

1910 (?) Photograph of Colonial Theater
(https://digital.grinnell.edu/islandora/object/grinnell%3A6258)

Although Redmon was two years behind her at Grinnell, Meacham surely knew him, since Redmon was one of the 1911 organizers of Quill and Gavel, a small public speaking group on campus to which Meacham's brother, Frank (class of 1913), also belonged. Moreover, Redmon gained the attention of the entire campus with his skilled orations, including his spring 1911 competition for the Spaulding Prize. Just weeks before Meacham's graduation, Redmon took the stage of the Colonial Theater to address "The African in America." According to the newspaper,

Redmon...took up the always present, the ever perplexing theme of race prejudice, as it applied to his own race. After the first few sentences, he had the entire sympathy of his audience as he told of the wrongs and injustice, the barriers against advancement in all lines, which the Afro-American had to face. It was a seething indictment against prevailing ideas in the United States, and, what was worse, it was hard to find a flaw in the propositions which he advanced (GR 5/8/1911).

Meacham could not have missed this talk, and not only because of her brother's closeness to Redmon; the Spaulding competition was always spirited and, convened in the spacious downtown auditorium of the Colonial, attracted a large audience. Moreover, as the immediate future indicated, Meacham proved herself increasingly attentive to questions of race. Two months after her graduation from Grinnell Meacham was one of three speakers at the Woman's Home Missionary Union meeting at the Grinnell Congregational Church where the theme was "The Negro" (GH 8/22/1911). No report of her speech survives, but it bears emphasizing that by this time Meacham had already accepted appointment to teach at Beach Institute, an all-Black school in Savannah, Georgia, deep in the heart of the old Confederacy (GR 8/28/1911; Marshalltown Evening Times-Republican 9/25/1911; GR 9/28/1911).

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Beach Institute, founded in 1865, was one of many schools in the US South intended to educate African Americans who were prevented from public education by Jim Crow and southern racism. Several crises, including two serious fires, plagued the school which in 1914 had seven teachers for 168 students, the great majority of whom pursued "industrial" education (W. T. B. Williams, "Duplication of Schools for Negro Youth," Occasional Papers of John F. Slater Fund, no.15[1914],15).

AMA Staff at Beach Institute 1911-12
(List of Missionaries Under the Auspices of American Missionary Association 1911-1912 [NY: American Missionary Association, 1911], 10)

Meacham was not the first Grinnellian to serve at Beach: her fellow Grinnell alumna, Helen R. Field, had joined the staff at Beach immediately after her 1910 graduation (Grinnell Review 10/1910, p. 14), and no doubt provided helpful advice for the newcomer. Unfortunately, soon after Meacham arrived in Georgia, Field fell ill with "breakbone fever"—dengue fever—which probably limited the help she could provide the new recruit (GR 10/30/1912; GH 10/15/1912). As a slim diary for 1913 confirms, Meacham found teaching Beach high schoolers a challenge, but she worked hard, in the process having become a much-valued staff member. In her third year at Beach Meacham herself fell seriously ill and was obliged to return to Grinnell to recuperate. Instead of teaching at an AMA school the next year, Meacham taught at a Grinnell area rural school while she recovered her health (Marshalltown Evening Times-Republican 6/10/1915; Clarinda Journal 6/8/1916).

With World War I as background, Meacham took up her second AMA post in 1916, this time at Brewer Normal School in Greenwood, South Carolina (Clarinda Journal 6/8/1916). Founded as a Negro boarding school in 1870 by the AMA, Brewer Institute, as it was originally known, "furnished the majority of the best educated of the colored race" (Greenwood Daily Journal 5/13/1897).

Brewer Normal Institute, College Building
(Greenwood Daily Journal 5/13/1897)

At Brewer as at Beach, most of the staff were women. Bessie Meacham was one of three who taught high school students; two taught elementary students, two taught "industrial" subjects, one taught music, and a Connecticut man was in charge of agriculture. Another unspecified illness interrupted Meacham's work in South Carolina, sending her back to Iowa in March 1918 to recuperate (Clarinda Journal 3/21/1918; Grinnell Review 4-5/1918, p. 332).

That autumn Meacham followed a somewhat different course in her work, perhaps because of the illness she had endured in South Carolina. Instead of heading south, she went west to Albuquerque, New Mexico where she spent a year at the Rio Grande Industrial School (Grinnell Review 12/1918, p. 34). 

ca. 1909 Photograph of Heald Hall, Rio Grande Industrial School
(Rev. J. H. Heald, The Rio Grande Industrial School [Boston: Congregational Education Society, 1909]

Another AMA-sponsored institution, the Rio Grande school had a very different student body. Here, instead of African Americans, Meacham taught Mexicans in a school organized around practical education. Founded in 1908 on 160 acres that included stock and farm implements, the Rio Grande school began with twenty pupils and a curriculum dominated by agriculture. Most of the instruction took place in English, as part of the ambition of the school was to teach Mexicans English. However, since moral and religious ideas "are best imparted in one's native tongue," religious instruction came in Spanish (Heald, Rio Grande Industrial School, 5-7). As before at Beach Institute, Bessie Meacham was not the only Grinnellian on the Rio Grande faculty. In 1917 Mary Frisbie, a 1915 graduate of Grinnell, began teaching in Albuquerque and was still on the faculty when Meacham, returning to her earlier commitment to Black schools in the US South, left to take up a new appointment in Marion, Alabama (Grinnell Review 10/1917, p. 211; GH 8/23/1918; GH 8/26/1919). 

Begun in 1867, Lincoln Normal prospered until the end of Reconstruction when local antipathy encouraged an arsonist to burn it down. Opposition within the state legislature resulted in a measure that prohibited the return of the institution to Marion, leading the AMA to abandon the project temporarily. Marion Blacks, however, had a different idea and, on the basis of their own subscriptions, raised money to reopen the school. This initiative persuaded the AMA to reconsider, sending teachers to Marion and purchasing a home for the principal. Although enthusiasm was high, resources remained skimpy, persuading the AMA in 1897 once again to withdraw from Marion. As before, however, Black families resisted, supplying funds to acquire some necessities and promising teachers that, if they remained at the school, parents of the school's students would feed them. Impressed by the commitment of Black parents in Marion, the AMA relented and resumed support. A burst of growth followed: by 1904 Lincoln Normal had 400 students (Robert G. Sherer, Black Education in Alabama, 1865-1901 [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997], 131-33).

1922 Photo of Teachers at Lincoln Normal School; Meacham: first row, 3rd from left
(https://digitalcollections.libraries.ua.edu/digital/collection/p17336coll22/id/270/rec/1, Plate 35 )

Autumn 1919 Bessie Meacham left Grinnell for Marion, Alabama where for the next fifteen years she taught English and History at Lincoln Normal (GH 10/3/1919; Putnam Patriot 5/31/1934). 

Undated Photograph of Students at Lincoln Normal School
(American Missionary Association Photographs, 1887-1952, Tulane University Digital Library: https://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/islandora/object/tulane%3A3179)

During her last several years at Lincoln Normal Meacham prepared herself to move from the classroom to the library. Every summer, beginning in 1930, she attended Chautauqua Library School in New York. 

May 8, 1934 Letter of Bessie K. Meacham to LeMoyne College President Frank Sweeney (1929-40)
(Archives, Hollis F. Price Library, LeMoyne-Owen College; thanks to Jameka Townsend for sharing this document with me)

Consequently, when in 1934 she accepted a position in the library of all-Black LeMoyne (now LeMoyne-Owen) College in Memphis, Tennessee, Meacham had the equivalent of a master's degree in library science. Beginning as an assistant librarian, Meacham became head of the library in 1944 and remained in that position until she retired in 1952, having spent almost forty years working in Black schools in the U.S. South (Richland Clarion 7/31/1952). 

Photograph of Bessie K. Meacham, Head Librarian, LeMoyne College
(1950 LeMoyne College Yearbook; thanks to Jameka Townsend for sharing this photo with me)

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Although the places where Bessie Meacham worked in the years after her 1911 graduation from Grinnell demonstrate powerfully her commitment to changing the racist social order of twentieth-century America, it would be helpful to have her own words to help us understand what she felt about this work. Thanks to a 1912 Christmas gift from her sister, Floy, Bessie Meacham kept a diary for the calendar year 1913 and here she resolved to use the small booklet "to put down not only the facts and events, but [also] my thots [sic] on the same." Nevertheless, terse reports on the quotidian dominate the diary entries, only occasionally interrupted with insights into Meacham's life at Beach Institute. 

Title Page of Bessie Meacham's 1913 Diary
(David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, "Townsend Family Papers," Box 4)

As the diary confirms, Meacham saw all around her the hatred of white Americans toward Blacks. For example, the diary reports that in late January she visited a Black woman who had been enslaved to a white woman in whose household she now served as a free laborer. Her white mistress had not managed to accept the transition in the maid's situation, telling "her [that she would] kill her if [she were] not such a good worker." The white mistress went on to say that heaven did not appeal to her "if a nigger or Yankee goes" there too (January 30). Dr. Reid, a local white physician to whom Meacham went several times in 1913 for relief from illness, maintained that "the black man is only rarely capable of being a leader" (April 9). Not even the staff at Beach was immune to racism. According to Meacham's diary, the wife of the school's principal acknowledged that she "would rather have the white friend than a hundred colored" (March 17).

In addition to these real life experiences of racism, Meacham continued to be influenced by her reading, the choices of which seem to stem from her experience with the Social Gospel at Grinnell.  Early in the 1913 diary, for example, she reported (January 2) that she was reading the latest issue of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Crisis. The December 1912 issue that Meacham read in early January in Georgia included a report on efforts of the Alabama legislature to "oppose any bill that would compel Negroes to educate their children... " (The Crisis, Dec. 1912, p. 61). A speech from Georgia's Senator Hoke Smith (1855-1931) quoted on the pages of The Crisis (ibid., p. 70) asserted that "The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; he is contented to occupy the natural status of his race, the position of inferiority...." A few pages earlier The Crisis informed readers about the arrest of a Black Georgia man who had "accidentally or intentionally touched a white woman with one of his hands." A hurried trial had found him guilty, the judge sentencing the defendant to twenty years in the penitentiary. After an appeals court granted the man a new trial, the same judge repeated the sentence, obliging the appeals court to reverse him again (p. 64). The journal also cataloged a series of the most recent lynchings and other murders of Black men (p. 65). With this literature in mind Meacham asked her diary (January 2), "Will nobody ever solve this 'eternal problem' of the black man's position in America?"

Undated Photo of Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)
(https://abhsarchives.org/father-social-gospel-born/)

I suppose that Meacham learned of The Crisis from her Grinnell education, although I was unable to learn whether the college library had begun its subscription before Meacham's 1911 graduation. Other titles in her reading indicate Meacham's continued association with Grinnell College. Her diary several times reports that she was reading issues of the Scarlet and Black that her brother had sent from Grinnell. And when she returned to Grinnell in late May 1913 for summer vacation, she immersed herself in college happenings. May 30th, for instance, she attended Friday chapel to hear Dr. Steiner's brother speak, and the following day she and her brother, Frank, were present for the Hyde Prize orations. 

On June 11th she took in her brother's college graduation ceremony at which Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch, a prominent advocate of the Social Gospel, addressed "The Call of Social Problems to the College Man and Woman." So far as the newspaper account can confirm (Grinnell Register 6/12/1913), Rauschenbusch did not mention race in his address. Nevertheless, elsewhere Rauschenbusch had argued that 

...no man shares his life with God, whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master (Christianity and the Social Crisis [New York: The Macmillan Co., 1907], 48-49).

Despite the absence of a direct reference to racial injustice, Bessie Meacham could hardly have wished for a more full-throated commendation of the career path she had chosen, helping reconstruct education and social relations for Black Americans in the U.S. South. 

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Photograph of 1966 Grinnell College Alumni Award Winners; Bessie Meacham front row, middle
(Alumni Scarlet and Black July-August 1966)

When contacted in spring 1966 by the college alumni office with news that she had been nominated for an alumni award, Bessie Meacham responded humbly: "I shall try to tell you of my life's work, although it may not sound very glamorous," she wrote. Summarizing her forty years at Black schools in the South, Meacham declined to characterize her "contribution to the education of the present generation of Negro youth," as the alumni office had evidently requested. "I have not been the kind of person who turns the world upside down," she concluded modestly (April 6, 1966 letter from Bessie K. Meacham to Mrs. Mullins, Alumni Award records, Grinnell College Office of Development and Alumni Relations). 

The citation that accompanied her award at reunion in 1966, however, was more assertive, recognizing that Meacham had gone south "to help give negroes opportunity for education." "The benefits from her years of teaching," the citation continued, "are spread through many communities," including those at LeMoyne College with which Grinnell was then exchanging students ("Bessie K. Meacham, 1911," 1966 alumni citation, ibid.).

Neither George Herron nor Edward Steiner were around in 1966 to congratulate Meacham. But if they had been, these two giants of the Social Gospel would surely have praised her for taking her Christian faith deep into the heart of some of America's worst social ills. Her Christianity, although deeply pious, was also socially committed and intended to overturn the bias built into American racism.