Feb 21, 2008 - Sale 2137

Sale 2137 - Lot 345

Price Realized: $ 21,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
A MOST REMARKABLE MAN (RELIGION.) ADAMS, REV. R[EVELS] A[LCORN]. Large archive of original material including three novels, hundreds of pages of poetry, sermons, essays and miscellaneous writings. Including a few self-published pamphlets. All of the material is in very good condition. should be seen. Vp, circa 1890s-1940s
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Revered R. A. Adams was an evangelical minister of the A. M. E. Church (1869-1946). Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, he attended common schools, was licensed to preach at 19, and ordained by noted Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner at 23. He seems to have risen rapidly through the church, serving in Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and the Dominion of Canada.

Reverend Adams was a prolific writer and managed to produce thousands of pages of poetry, short stories, essays, a large folder of original music, sermons and some socio-political pamphlets, as well as a few plays and three novels. Of all this enormous output, it would seem that only a handful of pamphlets were ever published, and those by Adams's Progress Publishing Co. in Wichita, Kansas, circa 1900-1920. Titles include Psychoanalysis and Racial Affinity, Highlights of Negro History, and Syphilis, The Black Plague. None of these titles are cited by Work, Blockson, or any other reference consulted.

Adams was a rather unorthodox writer and most definitely an unorthodox black minister for his time. The subjects of his work are often more akin to Joel Augustus Rogers, or John Bruce than an A.M. E. minister. "Seeing White." "Making a Fetish of White. Racial Myopia," and "Psychoanalysis and Racial Affinity . . . Black Mama Fixations," are typical of some of Adams's pamphlet works.

Among the copious typed and handwritten manuscript material are three novels: Babylon (450 pp), described by Adams as "Religious--Sociological--Interracial--Stresses Gospel as Panacea for all Social Ills;" Deacon Simpson, (250 pp), "Story of Negro Church Life--Contrasting Old, Unlettered Ministers with Modern Products--Evolution in Negro Church Life;" and The Great Cathedral (400 pp), Exposure of Graft, Corruption, Autocracy, and Ecclesiastical Misfeasance--Predicting Revolution and reformation of the Negro Church."

Adams's critical essays on the Negro Church of the late 19th- early 20th century are insightful, and at times quite humorous, especially "The Negro and His Church, Whangdoodle Evangelism." Adams describes "Whangdoodleism" as "Bible-beating, ultra emotionalism, pulpit gymnastics, wearing ridiculous apparel, 'toning,' entertaining antics called 'clowning,'" etc., and states that at the base of all of this is "the minister with the itching palm."