Dear Sisters and Brothers:
i am tonight posting the second in a series of documents uncovered in my research into race relations among Churches of Christ. The author is John Moody McCaleb (1861-1953), graduate of Kentucky University and the College of the Bible, where he was a student of John W. McGarvey and a classmate of Hall Laurie Calhoun. McGarvey was a missionary to Japan for almost all of the twentieth century prior to World War II. He is a neglected figure; there is to my knowledge no critical biography. i should think that the missiologists among us would want to study Brother McCaleb, for he had, as he displays here, a truly "global" consciousness long before it was fashionable--nay, before it was possible! He wrote this text from Tokyo. The citation is
J. M. McCaleb, "The Negro," GA 46 (17 March 1904): 166.
The Negro has intellect. I speak of him in particular because he is supposed to be the lowest of the races. "It is often said that the mental and moral character of the negro is altogether inferior to that of the white man; that he is intellectually a fool; that he is lazy, dishonest, untruthful, and unfeeling. My opinion is that there are as many good people, naturally, among the negroes as among the rest of mankind. Stanley, who traveled across Africa and who knew the Africans well, both in America and in Africa itself, emphatically affirms that there is no natural difference between them and other people."
The colored man is as truthful as others. If it be said that nearly all the negroes are liars, I am not prepared to deny it; but this applies equally to the white people as well. David said, a long time ago: " All men are liars." Millions of lies are probably told every day in the little expression, " I am glad to see you." Subjugated people and servants learn to lie to escape punishment from the stronger, but the latter lie just as readily from other causes. Where is the merchant, the tradesman, or the lawyer that does not lie continually, and call it "shrewdness?" If an unprejudiced test were made, I am sure one race would have little advantage over another on the subject of truth telling; and the difference, if any, can be easily accounted for on the ground of difference of environment and training. The truth or falsity, the honor or dishonor, of a thing is usually judged by a local standard established by custom and local training, and not by the absolute. For this reason we often condemn others, when in reality they are guilty of no more serious crime than we. They have simply not followed our way of looking at it. God has made of one all the nations to dwell upon the face of the earth. The fact that Jesus died for all shows that all are of one nature and one blood.
i do not know the source or the provenance of the quotation in the first paragraph. Does anyone recognize it?
Where did McCaleb get his ethics and his theological anthropology? Was anyone else among Churches of Christ writing this way in 1904? Had anyone come to transcend race in the way that McCaleb had? (RMR, was your grandfather influenced by McCaleb?) Were McCaleb's actions on the mission field consistent with his thought? Where is that biography?
May God have mercy!
dhaymes, his mark +