The Career of Irvin Underhill: Foreign Missions and Race Relations in Africa and the United States

When Irvin Underhill arrived in Cameroun in 1929, he became the first African American to serve in the Presbyterians’ West African Mission. Several years of debate within the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Society had preceded Underhill’s appointment, and he remained the only African American missionary in the West African Mission until he was forced to leave in 1940. After leaving missionary work, Underhill directed a housing project in Philadelphia and eventually went on to become the first African American pastor of a white Presbyterian church. Underhill’s extraordinary life highlights how foreign missions were important for the construction of race relations on both sides of the Atlantic.

My paper will examine the debates in the executive board of the Presbyterian Church that ultimately led to Underhill’s appointment, as well as the events that resulted in Underhill’s forced furlough in 1940. Underhill’s appointment to the West African Mission in 1928 represents an important—if small—achievement on the part of African Americans for greater racial equality in American religious life. Toward the end of the 1930s, Underhill challenged racism in both the Presbyterian West African Mission and the French colonial government when he opposed the mission’s use of physical punishments on Africans and the colonial government’s use of forced labor. Underhill’s challenge of the Presbyterian West African Mission’s treatment of Africans strained relations between the mission and colonial government and resulted in a growing rift between white missionaries and the mission’s black pastors and teachers. Ultimately, Underhill not only became the first African America missionary in West Africa, but he caused Presbyterians to reevaluate the power relations between white missionaries and African pastors and teachers in their mission.