Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism

The history of American freethought as Jacoby tells it is largely a white history. Christopher Cameron’s project is not a corrective to Jacoby so much as a supplement that exposes what her frame of reference could not see: a continuous tradition of African American scepticism, running from antebellum abolitionism through the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights era and beyond, conducted in full awareness that the dominant culture would be considerably less forgiving of Black unbelief than of white.

The Core Claim

African American secularism has a substantial, documented history that mainstream histories of freethought have ignored and that histories of African American intellectual life have subordinated to the central role of the Black church. Cameron argues that these two suppressions reinforce each other: because freethought historiography has been predominantly white, and because Black intellectual history has naturally emphasised the institution most central to Black communal life, the Black freethinker becomes doubly invisible. The tradition includes figures of considerable importance — Frederick Douglass in his more sceptical moments, the socialist agitator Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph — who have been remembered for other things and whose unbelief has been quietly edited out.

Where the Argument Is Strongest

The Harlem Renaissance material is the book’s most original contribution. Cameron demonstrates that the Renaissance was not merely a cultural flowering but a site of organised secular intellectual life — freethinkers’ societies, rationalist publications, open debates about the role of religion in Black political life — that the dominant memory of the period has substantially erased. The recovery of Hubert Harrison is particularly valuable: a socialist, atheist, Caribbean immigrant whose influence on Harlem intellectual life has been marginalised partly because none of the available categories adequately contain him. The parallel with Jacoby’s recovery of Ingersoll is exact, and the structural argument is the same: what looks like a marginal tendency was once a genuine presence, and its disappearance from the record is the result of erasure rather than absence.

The analysis of the specific pressures bearing on Black freethinkers is also acute. White unbelief was dangerous enough in a culture that equated godlessness with moral and political unreliability; Black unbelief carried additional risk, given that religious faith was one of the few sources of communal solidarity and moral authority available to a community under sustained assault. The decision to identify publicly as a freethinker was therefore not simply an intellectual position but a choice with concrete social and political consequences, and Cameron gives it the weight it deserves.

Where It Strains

The definition of secularism expands and contracts to serve the argument in ways that occasionally leave the reader uncertain what exactly is being claimed. Figures who were anti-clerical without being atheist, privately sceptical without being publicly secularist, or simply in tension with orthodox Christianity are gathered into a tradition they might have disputed. This is a familiar problem in intellectual history — Jacoby faces it too — but Cameron’s criteria are not always made explicit.

The coverage thins considerably after mid-century. The rich documentation of the early-twentieth-century material is not matched for the civil rights era and after, where the argument becomes more schematic. The relationship between Black secularism and the specifically religious idiom of the civil rights movement — which Cameron acknowledges was a genuine tension — receives less analysis than the earlier periods, and it is precisely here that the argument most needs development.

Verdict

An important extension of Jacoby’s project into territory Jacoby did not adequately explore, and a genuine contribution to African American intellectual history. The Harlem Renaissance sections are essential reading. Cameron’s book demonstrates that the suppression of the freethinking tradition in America has been compounded by the suppression of its Black strand — a double erasure that his recovery, partial as it necessarily is, begins to address.