Freethinkers and African American Intellectual History

Christopher Cameron’s newest book, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism, is an attempt to rectify what he sees as a glaring assumption in African American history. “The assumption that atheism and other forms of nonbelief are the preserve of whites,” wrote Cameron, “has caused most historians and scholars of religion to ignore or downplay their existence among African Americans” (ix). Indeed, in Black Freethinkers, Cameron goes to great lengths to showcase the long history of freethinking, agnosticism, and atheism among prominent African Americans. In the process, Black Freethinkers also demonstrates the importance of not just gathering sources but thinking about how to analyze such sources.

One of the strengths of Black Freethinkers is the fact that it is, in one sense, a survey of African American history from the perspective of non-religious thinkers. Indeed, the narrative of the book—from the earliest days of slavery in British North America all the way until the twenty-first century—should offer historians and other readers a different way to think about the African American past. Cameron’s use of slave narratives is a strong example. The focus in Black Freethinkers in Cameron’s analysis of the narratives is on how the formerly enslaved look back on their experiences with religion, especially Christianity. Certainly, their critiques of religion were also, from Cameron’s point of view, also instrumental in showing how “black freethinkers advanced the cause of abolition while also contributing to the growing freethought movement in the mid-nineteenth century” (4).

The ways in which African American freethinkers combined their irreligious views with other, better-known struggles for freedom and justice among African Americans is another key argument of this book. For Cameron, African American freethinkers such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neal Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Forman were all important precisely because their skepticism about religion wasn’t incidental to their better-known stances on civil rights but were central to them. For example, figures such as Douglass and Richard Wright delivered stinging critiques of the African American church, seeing them as obstacles to the broader Black Freedom Struggle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Likewise, the role of gender is a critical part of Cameron’s analysis, as many of the prominent African American female freethinkers saw a tie between a critique of the church and their own push for feminism. Nella Larsen’s book Quicksand offers a story that centers around Helga Crane, a woman who is dismayed by the importance of religion in numerous African American institutions—and the seeming hypocrisy of those who hold powerful positions in the African American church. The freethinking of individuals such as Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Walker is not incidental to their critiques of capitalism, racism, and misogyny, but are at the center of them.

The variety of famous voices in the book, all espousing freethinking, agnosticism, and atheism, may be surprising to people who only know African American historical figures for their stances against racism. But Black Freethinkers does focus only on such important figures. This is not a critique that should dissuade anyone from reading the book—in fact, the book opens up questions about the links not only between freethinking and African American history, but some of the sources in European and American philosophy and intellectual debate that are also read and absorbed by African Americans. But there is another book waiting to be written about how African American freethought looks on a local level. This would be a work of intellectual history that would, once again, raise questions about whose thoughts we privilege in the field. The good news is that, whoever decides to take up that mantel, has a good starting place with Christopher Cameron’s Black Freethinkers.