William H. Ferris, a progenitor of Afrocentric thought
Last week at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the eminent Rev. Herbert Daughtry had a book signing of his latest publication “The Passing of Giants,” and also recalled many legends, including three more notables who joined the ancestors: the Rev. James Lawson, Dr. Nathan Hare, and Dr. Wilson J. Moses. There’s a good chance that all three may be profiled in Rev. Daughtry’s next volume, though Dr. Moses may be missed since to date there has been no widely circulated published obituary.
If not for a notice from Dr. Errol Henderson, who for many years taught with Professor Moses at Penn State, we may not have known of his passing. That brings to mind many of the rather obscure personalities Dr. Moses discussed in one of his books, “Afrotopia: the Roots of African American Popular History” (1998). William Henry Ferris is among the numerous social and political activists and leaders Moses gives considerable attention to, with a particular interest on his ideological underpinnings.
Ferris’s political seeds were planted in New Haven, CT, where he was born on July 20, 1874 to David Henry Ferris, who fought for the Union in the Civil War, and Sarah Anne Jefferson Ferris. Upon finishing high school, he attended Yale University and fell under the influence and guidance of Professor William G. Sumner, a social darwinist who extended no good graces to the lower, marginalized members of society.
Ferris graduated in 1895 and began working as a freelance writer before entering the Harvard Divinity School in 1899. A year later, he received a master of arts degree in journalism and began teaching at two Florida schools,Tallahassee State College and Florida Baptist College. From 1903 to 1905, he taught at Henderson Normal School and Kittrell College in North Carolina. While still in North Carolina, he was the pastor of the Congressional Church in Wilmington and by 1910 he was an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. He later began missionary work in Salem, Massachusetts.
Ferris was highly critical of Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist ideas and expressed his opposition in articles published in the Boston Guardian newspaper, under the editorial direction of William Monroe Trotter. Such an outlook aligned him with W.E.B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement as well as with the American Negro Academy. As a member of the so-called “Talented Tenth,” helmed by Du Bois, Ferris was not a dyed-in-the wool proponent of such thinking, which often put him at odds with other African American thinkers and activists, especially Du Bois and Monroe Trotter.
Professor Moses captured some of Ferris’s ambiguity, noting that he was “typical of twentieth century Black nationalists in his commitment to the mythologies of progress and change, and his enthusiasm for confusing the two ideas.” His most acclaimed book “The African Abroad, or His Evolution in Western Civilization” did little to distill or mollify the disturbance among his colleagues. In fact, if anything, it only muddled his standing, particularly with his introduction of the term “Negro Saxon,” as a substitute for Negro. What clearly became unacceptable for the Black intelligentsia around Du Bois was welcomed by the Garveyites, and soon he was a member of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) and an editor at the Negro World, where his adoration for the great leader bordered on the excessive.
In Tony Martin’s book “Literary Garveyism,” Ferris is quoted extensively, most poignantly on Black arts and the middle class. “One of the stumbling blocks in the pathway to Negro progress,” Ferris wrote in the Negro World, “is the Negro’s false conception of art. Art to him, be it music, poetry, drama, sculpture, painting [or] literature…is a thing that appeals exclusively to cultural-minded, the bourgeoisie, to the lords and ladies who try, and fail miserably, to develop a genuine Bohemianism….” He concluded that great art did not have to lose touch with the masses.
Ferris elaborated on these concepts and conclusions in “The African Abroad,” which Moses opined “was a most impressive blending of Afrocentric and cosmopolitan ideas.” Moses also offered an encomium for Ferris, citing that he died on August 23, 1941, penniless and obscure in his room on 10 W. 123rd Street in Harlem. “His obituary in ‘The Journal of Negro History’ described him as ‘a man whose career is difficult to estimate…His body was saved from Potter’s Field through the action of the treasurer of Yale, a member of Ferris’s class of 1895.’” Ferris was a complex man of intriguing thoughts and actions.
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