Deconstructing Accommodation versus Protest: Interracial Cooperation in the Black Baptist and Episcopal Churches during Reconstruction

The accommodation versus protest paradigm embodied in the depictions of the disagreements between
W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington have colored the interpretations of black interracial
cooperation. This paradigm, used to crystalize the essence of the conflict between two of the twentieth
centuries most noted black leaders, does not fit in the Reconstruction era religious context where black
people were working out how to live alongside their fellow co-religionists while challenging the racial
paradigms of slavery.
I posit that the strategies that black folks used in this period encompassed what appeared to be
oppositional strategies of collaboration and contest all geared toward the goal of establishing a
meaningful black freedom.A comparative exploration of the work of black Episcopalians and black
Baptists to establish educational institutions in the reconstruction era illustrates this point. Rev. James
Solomon Russell ‘s creation of the St. Paul School under the aegis of the Episcopal Church and the
Virginia Baptist State Convention debates about creating the Virginia Theological Seminary represent
the various discussions about interracial cooperation and the strategies that free and free blacks in
religious space used to negotiate this transformation.
The developments in these two different denominations document the existence of these various
strategies despite the participants being separate from or integrated within predominantly white
churches. In this way, this paper not only shows that the definition of black churches based on
independent status is ill-fitting on the landscape of Reconstruction but also that the binaries of
accommodation and protest are not as illuminating when considering the strategies of interracial
cooperation exhibited in the Reconstruction era.