Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars (Religion & American Culture)

by Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

For Dixon, African Americans could never escape the content of their character, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., because they were doomed by the color of their skin. Here was scientific racism, the use of data to prove racial differences and to justify discrimination, at its worst. Dixon argued that African Americans needed to remember that they were, indeed, black and should be “willing to remain a negro, and give to posterity only negro children.” While he tolerated African American claims that Adam was “a colored man” and other statements of racial pride by black orators, he drew the line at intermarriage. “For [an African American] to assert and practice the right to intermarry with the whites,” Dixon argued, “is to doom his race to extinction.”