Before Niebuhr and Bennett, Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel movement’s greatest theologian, expressed his frustration: “For years the problem of the two races seemed to me so tragic, so insoluble that I have never yet ventured to discuss it in public.”[60] The Social Gospel advocates held conferences on the status of the Negro in Mohonk, New York, in 1890 and 1891 and felt no need to invite any blacks, because, as Lyman Abbott said, “A patient is not invited to the consultation of the doctors on his case.”[61]
