Middle West Review

The powerful sacred and secular functions of the church in African American communities first became readily apparent to most people across the nation during the Civil Rights Movement, but, long before the unfolding drama of the 1950s and 1960s, there were dedicated black clergy and laity endeavoring to ameliorate the harshness and address the injustice that was the legacy of slavery in America. It is one dimension of these earlier efforts that Julia Marie Robinson relates in her study of the work of the Reverend Robert Lewis Bradby and the Second Baptist Church of Detroit.

Second Baptist originated in 1836 when, because of discrimination, thirteen African American members withdrew from the predominantly white First Baptist Church of Detroit. According to Robinson, the church flourished and by the early twentieth century had emerged as a "central feature" of the black community in Detroit. Robert Bradby was born of Native American and white parentage in southern Canada in 1877. Even though his features might well have enabled him to pass for white, his multiracial heritage meant that Bradby was defined by the society of the day as non-white. That fact, as well as his close relationship with vital black communities in Canada, meant that he chose to define himself as black and quickly [End Page 76] became a promising pastor among black Canadian Baptists. In 1910, he became minister of the Second Baptist Church in Detroit, thus beginning a long, distinguished, and sometimes controversial career in the city just as it was emerging as one of the nation's most important and rapidly growing industrial centers.

Bradby's early years at Second Baptist coincided with the rising tide of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. The era from the Great War through the Great Depression, with its many socioeconomic stresses and strains, was one of both opportunity and challenge for the church's pastor and parishioners. Robinson contends that Bradby's youthful experience with hardship and prejudice, involvement in socially-conscious black Canadian Baptist communities, and familiarity with early twentieth century progressive and Social Gospel ideas converged to shape his vision of Second Baptist's mission. Worshipers heard from their minister sermons that were a "mixture of the Gospel message, racial uplift, and the Social Gospel's call to establish the Kingdom of God." Bradby understood the "Kingdom" as the "presence of the divine reality and movement of God manifested in the ordinary experiences of supplying every need of the black community." To facilitate the arrival of the "Kingdom," the pastor and like-minded members of his congregation, especially church women, turned their attention to assisting the thousands of African Americans pouring into the city annually. Representatives of the church met migrants from the South in train and bus stations, offered assistance with securing food, clothing, and housing, and invited them to join their church family. Meanwhile, Bradby developed a mutually beneficial relationship with Henry Ford, for whom he provided reliable, disciplined, and generally compliant workers. In return, Second Baptist became an important conduit into the Ford Motor Company, thus contributing to a measure of status and financial security for hundreds of its members. As the newcomers settled in, Bradby's congregation not only provided material assistance and spiritual nurture to the uprooted, but also sought to acculturate them. Through the establishment of a variety of church clubs, programs, and community institutions, as well as through cooperation with other black churches, the Urban League, and interracial and white civic organizations, Bradby and his parishioners struggled to promote such traits as self-respect, discipline, frugality, sobriety, sexual purity, family stability, and appropriate public dress and demeanor, all of which were understood as not only virtues in themselves but characteristics which would enhance [End Page 77] the image of the African American community in Detroit. The latter was believed to...