A 'Black-White' Missionary
on the Imperial Stage:
William H. Sheppard and
Middle-Class Black Manhood
John G. Turner
Department of History
When William M. Morrison first arrived in the
Twelve years later, Sheppard resigned from the mission when
accused of multiple extramarital affairs, one of which resulted in the birth of
a son whom Sheppard left behind in the
Sheppard’s quiet concessions to southern racial etiquette fit uneasily with his public image as a missionary celebrity who symbolized a more robust black manhood in the late 1800s and early 1900s. While abroad, Sheppard made contact with a Congolese kingdom previously isolated from western colonists, uncovered and publicized colonial abuses, and won his acquittal at a libel trial instigated by a Belgian rubber company. On his speaking tours, he held both white and black audiences spellbound with his tales of cannibals, vicious beasts, colonial soldiers, and his own courageous and athletic feats. When Sheppard stepped off the stage or away from the pulpit, however, white southerners no longer saw him as an “apostle” or “chief” but instead viewed him merely as a “darky.”
Sheppard has been the subject of two recent biographers,
William E. Phipps and Pagan Kennedy, both of whom ably document Sheppard’s
colorful years in the
The different constructions of manhood and masculinity that appear throughout Sheppard’s career shed further light on his enigmatic personality and on middle-class black manhood at the turn of the twentieth century.[4] Sheppard cultivated a late-Victorian “civilized” manhood early in his career, adopted a more “primitive” and robust masculinity as an “imperial male,” and then returned to dignified domesticity after his resignation from the mission field. For Sheppard, masculinity was a series of performances, and his performances depended upon the setting and audience he faced. If Sheppard on a number of occasions remade himself, he did not simply choose between a variety of available “masculinities.” Instead, his choices reflect what R. W. Connell has termed the “hard compulsions under which gender configurations are formed.”[5] Sheppard’s various masculine personas suggest that in addition to analyzing how men and women described ideal male characteristics and practices, historians of gender must pay careful attention to the ways that dynamics of power – between whites and blacks and between men and women –shaped and constrained constructions of manhood. On the stage, Sheppard posed as the “King of Huntsmen,” but off the stage he found himself pushed back into the subservient, domestic roles that his southern white patrons deemed more appropriate for black men.
VICTORIAN MANHOOD IN THE
William Henry Sheppard was born in March 1865 in
In Sheppard’s adolescence and early adulthood, a series of
white men eclipsed his father as paternal figures. Sheppard repeatedly
cultivated relationships with white patrons and effusively praised their wisdom
and character. Around the age of ten, Sheppard moved to live with an aunt in
nearby
Later generations of black Americans resented the
paternalism of white men like Armstrong and their advocacy of manual education.
Although Sheppard surely found it in his best interest to warmly praise
After his graduation from
The southern Presbyterian hierarchy had mixed feelings about
commissioning black Americans as missionaries to
From the start, Sheppard and Lapsley developed a warm
friendship. Lapsley expressed some anxiety over how others on their ship would
treat his black colleague. Yet during an extended stay in
Shortly after his arrival in the
While in the
William Sheppard in an early photograph, courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Presbyterian Church (USA) (Philadelphia, PA). |
Many scholars have criticized the black middle class of
Sheppard’s day for cultivating Victorian respectability as a means of
distancing itself from the “black masses.”[31] There was, however, a positive sense of Christian mission in Sheppard’s
emphasis on duty and in his praise of figures like Armstong – an understanding
of manhood based not only on character in terms of personal respectability but also
on extending the blessings of education and character to others. For Sheppard,
that sense of responsibility included a desire to bring what he perceived to be
the benefits of Christianity and civilization to colonial
“THE KING OF HUNTSMEN”
Although he continued to present himself as a Victorian
gentleman in certain settings, Sheppard’s masculinity evolved in the
Once he overcame his initial culture shock, Sheppard demonstrated an unusually positive stance towards native Africans. He reacted with horror towards a group of cannibals, but he became entranced with the culture of the Kuba (or Bakuba) people. Sheppard and Lapsley were both impressed with this “most artistic race.”[33] Sheppard praised their beautiful artwork, their monogamous marriages (with the exception of the king), and their industry. The two Presbyterian missionaries intended to explore the Kuba country in 1892, although Sheppard reported that numerous white traders and Belgian officials encouraged the two missionaries to discard their plan. Evidently, Luckenga, king of the Kuba people, had long refused contact with white traders and threatened to kill anyone who helped a westerner reach his capital. Having befriended a number of Kuba traders by offering them hippopotamus meat, the two decided to risk the journey. Lapsley, however, died of a fever in May 1892. Sheppard, having already spent several months learning the Kuba dialect, resolved to journey to the Kuba capital accompanied by several of his native friends.
Sheppard devised an ingenious and humorous plan for
penetrating the Kuba kingdom and reaching its “forbidden” capital. Upon
reaching the last Kuba village known to him, he followed one of the villagers
heading to the next marketplace and moved closer to the capital. At each
village he reached, he told the inhabitants that he wanted to buy eggs, and
when the village ran out of eggs, the chief allowed one of Sheppard’s native
companions to follow a villager to the next marketplace. “For three months,”
Sheppard later recounted, “we did nothing but buy and eat eggs.”[34] Along the way,
Sheppard preached the gospel at each village and perfected his knowledge of the
Kuba language. Eventually, the king discovered his intrusion, but the king’s
council – citing Sheppard’s fluency in the language – proclaimed him to be one
of the king’s deceased relatives. The king welcomed Sheppard to the forbidden
capital, where he evangelized for four months without success and recorded his
observations of Kuba culture.[35] He also
discovered a lake previously unknown to westerners, which combined with his
exploits in reaching the capital earned him membership in
Sheppard returned to the
Sheppard brought Lucy and several other black American
missionaries back to the
After his return from his 1893-94 furlough, Sheppard focused
his work on the Kuba people. Despite Sheppard’s sense of identification with
Africans and admiration for Kuba culture, he in several respects embraced the
style of the colonial imperial male. Like many white colonists and
missionaries, Sheppard portrayed himself as a vehicle through which
civilization might come to benighted natives. In particular, he worked hard to
convert the Kuba, especially the Kuba nobility. Both Phipps and Kennedy
anachronistically portray Sheppard as a missionary interested more in cultural
understanding and social justice than in conversion and church membership.
Sheppard did devote much of his time to a wide variety of activities: charity,
social justice, linguistics, and the pursuit of friendship and adventure.
Nevertheless, he strongly believed that the Kuba – regardless of any positive
cultural traits – needed the gospel. “Nothing remains to be taught them,”
Sheppard insisted, “but the gospel, so superior is their intelligence.”[38] Though he spoke
little about the dangers of hell, Sheppard mourned over those Africans who
“died without knowing anything about the Lord Jesus Christ coming into the
world to seek and save the lost.”[39] He carefully
documented and praised conversions throughout his career and cared deeply about
the progress of the churches the mission helped plant in the
Furthermore, Sheppard promoted western morals, education,
and ideals. When Sheppard met a local king soon after arriving in the
William Morrison, Kuba witnesses from libel trial, and William H. Sheppard. Courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society. |
While Sheppard was an agent of western civilization, he also – both implicitly and explicitly – critiqued white American understandings of the imperial enterprise. Simply by being a black agent of western civilization, Sheppard called into question the standard assumption of most white American missionaries that connected whiteness and the Anglo-Saxon “race” with civilization.[42] He also explicitly critiqued western – or at least Belgian – colonialism and civilization. In 1899, he became embroiled in controversy because of a dramatic encounter with colonial atrocities. Natives from a neighboring region came to Ibanj and urged Sheppard to stop a raid by a group of cannibalistic warriors, the Zappo Zaps, who were employed by the Belgian authorities to collect tribute. They had plundered and razed more than a dozen villages in the Kassai region.[43] Sheppard was initially reluctant to investigate matters because he feared being killed himself. “It is just as if I were to take a rope,” he wrote, “and go out behind the house and hang myself.”[44] Orders soon came from Morrison, however, commissioning Sheppard to investigate and stop the raid. Fortunately, Sheppard met a Zappo Zap man whose life he had saved two years before, and he was allowed to enter the cannibals’ camp and discuss the raid with their chief, who explained that his people were acting on behalf of the state and the rubber companies. In the camp, he discovered partly eaten corpses and eighty-one severed right hands. “These were to have been carried up also to the state post to show how many of the natives had failed to bring in the rubber required by the state,” Sheppard reported.[45] The state used the threat of terror to extort the collection of rubber by natives, who saw their villages burned if they failed to produce the required tribute. Sheppard and his colleagues managed to free sixty-two captured women. Shortly thereafter, Lachlan Vass, a white Presbyterian missionary, visited the scene and confirmed Sheppard’s gruesome account. Morrison took Sheppard’s report to the state officials – who refused to investigate – and publicized the atrocities in missionary periodicals.[46]
While on another furlough in the
In 1906, Morrison published a poignant article by Sheppard
in the Kasai Herald, the mission’s periodical. In his article, Sheppard
described the devastation that the Kasai Company – the state-sponsored firm
that monopolized the rubber trade in the
Their farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically a slave, their houses now are mostly only half-built single rooms and are much neglected. The streets of their towns are not clean and well swept, as they once were. Even their children cry for bread.
Why this change? You have it in a few words. There are armed sentries of chartered trading companies, who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it. In the majority of the villages these people have not time to listen to the Gospel story, or give an answer concerning their soul’s salvation. Looking upon the changed scene now, one can only join with them in their groans as they must say: “Our burdens are greater than we can bear.”[49]
When Sheppard and Morrison refused to retract the article,
the Kasai Company sued Sheppard for defamation and injury in 1908. The court in
the capital of
Even as Sheppard gained fame for opposing colonial
atrocities, in his talks and articles he primarily portrayed himself as a
robust, athletic adventurer. During a 1905 talk at the Tuskegee Institute, he
recounted his initial adventures with Lapsley, his hunting proficiency, and his
crafty journey to the Bakuba capital, but spoke only briefly of the atrocities.[52]
Despite his
prominent role in the campaign against Belgian atrocities and his successful
evangelistic work among the Kuba people, Sheppard left audiences with the
impression that he primarily spent his time hunting and exploring. An article
in the Boston Herald reported Sheppard’s acquittal from the libel charge. Telling
of his early association with Lapsley, the paper concluded that “President
Roosevelt has had no such hunting adventures as befell these two missionaries”
and noted that they had “killed 36 hippopotami, two elephants, and many
crocodiles” while making five narrow escapes from “savages.”[53] Whenever
Sheppard returned to the
In the style of an imperial male, Sheppard loved posing in his pith helmet and clean white clothing. In one such picture he holds the carcass of a deadly boa constrictor in front of a group of natives. Sheppard, who dominates the picture and relegates his African friends to the background, appears as a physically and culturally superior protector of native Africans. With obvious pride, he wrote his former patron S. H. Henkel that a group of Congolese had dubbed him the “king of huntsmen.”[55] Rather than stress his gentleness and virtuous character, he now emphasized his athletic prowess, his physical protection of the Congolese and his white companions, and his love of the jungle. One church advertised Sheppard as “Black Livingstone,” recalling the English explorer and missionary David Livingstone.[56]
William H. Sheppard with snake in the |
By becoming “Black Livingstone,” Sheppard departed from the middle-class
black masculinity typical of his era, but he painstakingly accepted the
interracial standards of the Jim Crow South. Sheppard was deferential to
whites. When he spoke of his missionary work, Sheppard made clear the
preeminent role of his late white colleague Samuel Lapsley. In his speeches and
articles, he routinely praised Lapsley’s piety, concern for the natives, and
self-sacrificial death. He probably discerned that white audiences – even if
they thrilled to see “Black Livingstone” – also enjoyed hearing stories about
the pious white martyr. Sheppard continued to repeat the same material decades
after Lapsley’s 1892 death. He even put Lapsley’s photograph on the
frontispiece of his 1917 memoir, Presbyterian Pioneers in the
Even Sheppard’s critiques of colonial injustices were
somewhat hesitant and muted. He felt that it would be best if he took a
secondary role in the effort to publicize the atrocities. “Being a colored
man,” Sheppard explained to Vass, “I would not be understood criticizing a
white government before white people.”[59]
In 1904, the Belgian ambassador to the
Sheppard’s missionary persona as “the king of huntsmen”
suggests the appeal of muscular Christianity in the black church and indicates
that a black masculine fascination with the “primitive” was emerging well
before the
THE CHILDREN’S FRIEND
Sheppard’s 1909 acquittal marked the
Early in his marriage to Lucy Gannt, Sheppard wrote articles
for missionary journals that portrayed a happily married couple. Lucy made the
journey to the
Behind the scenes, however, there was more trauma and
distress than romance. The Sheppards’ first two children died in
Morrison took the leading role in communicating the mission’s displeasure with Sheppard’s behavior to denominational authorities. Samuel Chester, the executive secretary of the PCUS Foreign Missions Committee, met with Sheppard, cried with him, accepted his resignation, and expressed his satisfaction at Sheppard’s partial confession. Sheppard’s marriage and career survived his forced resignation from the mission, and the church did not severely sanction its missionary hero. Even after Sheppard’s additional confessions, the Presbytery of Atlanta only suspended him for a year and did not make Sheppard’s indiscretions public knowledge. As J. O. Reavis, another Presbyterian official, wrote Morrison, “only a few need know about the trouble at all.”[73]
The church’s handling of the case is somewhat curious. The
timing of Sheppard’s resignation – a mere two months after his acquittal –
suggests that Sheppard’s colleagues did not wish to press the matter while
Sheppard played a visible role in the Congolese human rights campaign. Reavis’s
assurance of near secrecy reveals a concern for the reputation of the mission.
At the same time as Morrison proceeded against Sheppard, he also corresponded
with
Both white and black missionaries – as well as other
colonists in
Sheppard’s infidelity was thus not unusual. It does,
nevertheless, suggest an additional aspect of his persona as an imperial male.
In the
Sheppard’s moral shortcomings recall the fears of Charles Stillman – the founder of Sheppard’s alma mater – that black missionaries would debauch the native maidens. Many white Americans portrayed black men as sexually unrestrained, licentious, and predisposed toward the rape of white women. Whites also alleged that a lack of sexual restraint made men of African descent “uncivilized.” Many black middle-class men sought to present themselves as virtuous and gentle in order to counter such negative stereotypes. In a sense, then, it is tragic that Sheppard’s actions could not rebut the racist beliefs of men like Stillman. Several scholars have lambasted the black middle class of Sheppard’s day for its false pretensions to Victorian virtue and sexual purity.[81] Sheppard praised the monogamy of the Kuba people while living more like the Kuba king. It is, however, worth considering that those false pretensions arose in the context of white stereotypes that misrepresented and distorted the masculinity and virtue of black and white men alike.
Sheppard’s affairs ended an illustrious missionary career highlighted by his accomplished record as an explorer, evangelist, and champion of justice. After his suspension ended in 1912, he accepted a call to pastor Grace Presbyterian Church in Louisville and work in the Presbyterian Colored Mission, an urban ministry run by John Little. Little, a white Presbyterian minister, did not advocate racial equality.[82] He designed his programs not to encourage a generation of well-educated black leaders, but rather to provide blacks with religious training and some basic skills to enable them to work in subordinate positions to whites as “chauffeurs, janitors, workers in factories, laundresses, and cooks.”[83] Little did not invite blacks to serve on the board of the mission. He did not socialize with the Sheppards, although William’s fame was largely responsible for the growth of the mission and church.[84] Starting from a base of around forty, Grace Presbyterian added sixty additional members during Sheppard’s first year.[85] By 1926, the final year of Sheppard’s active work as pastor, the congregation reported 334 members, nearly a tenfold increase in membership during Sheppard’s tenure.[86] He suffered a stroke in late 1926, never fully recovered, and died in November 1927.[87]
As always, Sheppard remained deferential towards southern
racial etiquette during his
Once his fame dissipated, Sheppard could no longer play the
role of “King of Huntsmen” or “Black Livingstone.” In his later years, Sheppard
reassumed a Victorian middle-class manhood, presenting himself as a loving
husband and father. A portrait taken of Sheppard with his wife and children
shortly after his return to
William H. Sheppard and family, n.d. Courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society. |
William, Lucy, Wilhelmina, and Max Sheppard, n.d. Courtesy
of the Presbyterian Historical Society (
Sheppard’s multiple personas and shrouded personality
suggest the difficulty scholars face in forming generalizations about
fin-de-siècle black middle-class masculinity. Sheppard was certainly not the
“beast” of the white imagination, but he was also not the Du Boisian dandy, not
the combative Jack Johnson, and not simply the Washingtonian conservative.[94]
Sheppard’s many
and at times contradictory masculine constructions suggest that for at least
some middle-class blacks, masculinity was as much a series of performances as a
cluster of ideals. Furthermore, Sheppard’s masculinity depended largely on the
setting he inhabited and the relative amount of autonomy he enjoyed. Sheppard
found an opportunity to travel to a colony where race was an unstable category
and he could operate with an autonomy virtually unthinkable for African
Americans in the South. While in the
At an 1895 Congress on Africa held at Gammon Theological
Seminary in
[1] William
M. Morrison,
[2]
Anecdotes from William E. Phipps, William
Sheppard: Congo’s African American Livingstone (
[3]
Phipps, William
Sheppard; Pagan Kennedy, Black
Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century
Phipps’s biography is a comprehensive and positive
portrayal of Sheppard’s accomplishments in the
[4] A
growing number of scholars have begun to explore the construction of manhood
and masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century. Representative works
include: Michael Kimmel, Manhood in
America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural
History of Gender and Race in the
Gail Bederman has charted two related but different
conceptions of manhood embedded in discourses about civilization in this time
period. Some Americans articulated a “civilized manliness,” focused on
self-control, virtue, achievement, and domesticity – traits that distinguished
civilized white men from savage and usually black men. Others – and sometimes
the same individuals – cultivated a “primitive masculinity,” which typically
included athleticism and virility and often reflected a desire to return to the
strength and vigor identified and admired in “savage” peoples. Recently,
historians of American religion have emphasized the influence of “muscular
Christianity” during this time period. See Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in
Protestant
On black masculinity during this time period, see
Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (
[5] See R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: California, 1995), 76.
[6] “The
Mother of a Famous Missionary,” Southern
Workman 29 (April 1900): 218-219. A 1909 article in the Boston Herald refers to Sheppard as the
“son of a slave.”
[7] Sheppard never referred to himself as “William Henry Sheppard, Jr.”
[8]
Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers in the
[9] John
Little, “Colored Evangelization,”
[10] See
Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of
Color: The Black Elite 1880-1920 (
[11]
[12] Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, 17; Sheppard, “Give Me Thine Hand,” Southern Workman 44 (March 1915): 166-169.
[13]
On
[14] Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, 17.
[15] Both
the Old School and
[16] See Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, chapter 1.
[17] Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, 15-16, 18.
[18] Phipps, William Sheppard, 8.
[19] For
example, the American Baptist Congo mission had 32 white and 14 black missionaries
as of 1894. See Williams, Black Americans
and the Evangelization of
[20] Shaloff, Reform in Leopold’s Congo, 16.
[21] See Phipps, William Sheppard, 14-15.
[22] Quoted in Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 72.
[23] Letter
from Lapsley,
[24]
[25] Sheppard, “Notes from the Kassai and the Kwango,” The Missionary 24 (July 1891): 254.
[26] Samuel
Lapsley, Life and Letters of Samuel
Norvell Lapsley, Missionary to the
[27]
[28] Sheppard, “Notes from the Kassai and the Kwango”: 257.
[29]
[30]
Sheppard,
[31] For examples, see Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color.
[32] See
John MacKenzie, “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine
Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times,” in J. A. Mangan and James
Walvin, Manliness and Morality:
Middle-Class Masculinity in
[33] Lapsley, Life and Letters, 192.
[34]
Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” address at
[35]
Sheppard’s various accounts of his initial meeting with the Kuba king are
confusing. In the earliest accounts, he reports that the Kuba accepted him as
the spirit of the king’s grandfather. Sheppard, “Into the Heart of
[36] Unfortunately,
there are few revealing sources on Lucy Gannt Sheppard. The best available
source is a brief biography by Julia Lake Kellersberger, Lucy Gantt Sheppard: Shepherdess of His Sheep on Two Continents (
[37] Quoted in Phipps, William Sheppard, 98.
[38] Article
in Hampton Student
[39]
Sheppard, “An African’s Work for
[40]
Sheppard letter of
[41]
Sheppard, “Experiences of a Pioneer Missionary on the
[42] See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 22.
[43] Hochschild provides a good brief account of Sheppard’s encounter with the Zappo Zap raiders. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 164-165.
[44] Sheppard, “An African’s Work”: 771.
[45]
Sheppard, “Light in Darkest
[46] Shaloff, Reform in Leopold’s Congo, 77-78.
[47] Sheppard, “An African’s Work: 770-71; Sheppard, “Light in Darkest Africa”: 225.
[48]
[49] Reprinted in: “William Sheppard: Christian Fighter for African Rights,” Southern Workman 39 (Jan. 1910): 8-9. Italics Sheppard’s.
[50] Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 185.
[51] Phipps William Sheppard, 196.
[52]
[53]
[54] See
Harold G. Cureau, “William H. Sheppard: Missionary to the
[55] Letter
from Sheppard to S. H. Henkel,
[56] One undated bulletin contained in the Sheppard Papers advertises Sheppard as “Black Livingstone” for a lecture at Wyoming Presbyterian Church. Sheppard Papers, Box 8, HUA.
[57]
[58] Verner,
Samuel P., Pioneering in Central Africa
(
[59] Quoted in Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 161.
[60] Baron
Moncheur to Chevalier de Cuveleir,
[61]
Transcript of press release about Sheppard speech, “Life in the
[62] See
Martin Summers, Manliness and Its
Discontents. Summers chronicles a shift in African American masculinity in
the early twentieth century from a Victorian, producerist emphasis on character
formation to a Jazz Age, consumerist emphasis on self-expression and
self-fulfillment. Summers observes in the Harlem Renaissance an explosion of
artistic interest in the African primitive as a source of renewed masculinity
in the face of the emasculating effects of advanced western civilization. It is
interesting that Sheppard so warmly appreciated African art and culture long
before the explosion of black interest in
[63]
According to Michele Mitchell, a number of African American leaders in the late
1800s and early 1900s (“race men”) asserted that black men could only pursue
true “manhood” outside the
[64] This analysis supports the observation made by Gail Bederman that the same individuals often embraced both “civilized manliness” and “primitive masculinity.”
[65] Letter
from Sheppard to “Mr. Morton,”
[66]
Benedetto has published several documents that shed light on Sheppard’s
indiscretions. See Benedetto, Reformers
in
[67] Quoted in Phipps, 105.
[68] Sheppard, “A Second Visit to Lukenga,” The Missionary (June 1896): 270-275.
[69] Rev. D. C. Rankin, “A Missionary Heroine,” The Central Presbyterian ca. 1905, clipping found in Sheppard Papers, HUA.
[70] See
Benedetto, Reformers in
[71] Phipps, William Sheppard, 177.
[72] A poignant example of Lucy Sheppard’s invisibility came in a profile of her published in Harper’s Bazaar. The article complimented Lucy Sheppard’s education, eloquence, and dedication but never mentioned her name. Reprinted in Christian Observer (Sept. 28, 1898): 5.
[73] Letter
from J. O. Reavis to Morrison,
[74]
Morrison to S. H. Chester,
[75] Phipps
terms Hawkins a “bachelor,” but Kennedy says that Hawkins left his wife behind
in the
[76] Kennedy, though she does not elaborate, pronounces the evidence against Phipps “sketchy.” See Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 191.
[77] Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 191.
[78] Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 178.
[79] Lapsley, Life and Letters, 179, quoted in Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 179.
[80] Phipps, while he documents Sheppard’s infidelities, does not seem to consider them a significant aspect of Sheppard’s personality. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that “Sheppard was more of a partner with his spouse than Livingstone.” Phipps, 213.
[81] Daniel Levering Lewis, in his biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, explains that “if black life at the upper end of the social scale was more Victorian in its moral protestations than white life, there was at least as much, if not more, duplicity in its sexual conduct.” Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: 1993), 187. Martin Summers makes a similar critique in Manliness and Its Discontents and he celebrates the emergence in the 1920s of a “more modern, healthier masculinity that was defined by the body, sexual desire, and an ethos of consumption.” Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 241. While it is always easy to document the repression and hypocrisy accompanying Victorian mores – and Sheppard’s biography is excellent fodder for such critiques – one cannot help but also notice the often narcissistic, irresponsible, and still patriarchal attitudes displayed by many of the representatives of this “healthier masculinity” in Summers’s study.
[82] See
George C. Wright, Life Behind a Veil:
Blacks in
[83] John Little, Presbyterian Colored Mission, Annual Report January 1, 1918, Papers of the Presbyterian Community Center (hereafter PCC), Box 3, University of Louisville Archives, Louisville, KY (hereafter ULA).
[84]
Interview with Max Sheppard,
[85]
Presbyterian Colored
[86]
Presbyterian Colored
[87]
[88] Anne Fontaine Downs, “Service from Sunday School to Social Science, a History of Louisville’s Presbyterian Community Center, 1898-1982,” p. 37. In PCC, ULA.
[89] S. H. Chester, introduction to Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers.
[90] See Wright, Life Behind a Veil, 231-38, 274-80.
[91] Letter
from Robert Russa Moton to Booker T. Washington,
[92] Kennedy, Black Livingstone, 198.
[93] Anne
M’Neilly White, “From Darkest Africa to Darkest
[94] On Du Bois and masculinity, see Monica L. Miller, “W.E.B. Du Bois as a Diasporic Race Man,” Callaloo 26.3 (2003): 738-765. On Johnson, see Bederman, chapter 1.
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