Background

Charles Lincoln was to a poor family on June 23, 1924, in Athens, Alabama, United States. He was abandoned by his father. By the time he was four, his mother, Bradonia Lincoln, had married Ernest Blye and moved to Pittsburgh, and his father had moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Lincoln remained in Athens, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents, Mattie Sowell Lincoln and Charles Less Lincoln. He didn’t meet his father until he was 19.

Education

As a youngster, Lincoln would rise at 3 a.m. and walk three miles to his job as a milkman’s delivery boy, then walk back home to go to school. Although most blacks growing up in the rural South in the 1930s stopped going to school by the sixth grade, Lincoln had the good fortune to attend Trinity School, rebuilt after a fire set by the Ku Klux Klan. The school was run by New Englanders who believed that blacks and women had the same intellectual potential as white males.

Lincoln soaked up learning, noting that by high school he knew "all the great operas and their composers" and had "read all the English poets" as well as thinkers such as Marx and Lenin. Lincoln graduated as valedictorian in May 1939 from Trinity High School in Athens; his high school principal, J. T. Wright, loaned Lincoln $50 to buy a suit and a one-way ticket to Chicago. When Lincoln arrived in Chicago, he discovered that racial prejudice and discrimination were not exclusive to the South.

Encouraged by his former principal, he enrolled in night classes at the University of Chicago, then transferred to LeMoyne College in Memphis, where he earned his first bachelor’s degree. He later earned a bachelor of divinity degree from the University of Chicago. He received his doctorate from Boston College in 1960.

Career

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lincoln tried to enlist in the Navy but was refused enlistment because of his race. Two years later, he was drafted and served in the Navy until the war ended in 1945. Between 1947 and 1950, Lincoln worked numerous jobs, including serving as a road manager for the Birmingham Black Barons baseball team. During his tenure, the team signed future Hall of Famer and fellow Alabamian Willie Mays.

In the 1960s, Lincoln published The Black Muslims in America (1961), a seminal work on the history of the Nation of Islam that was credited with bringing black Muslims in America out of the shadows. The New York Times reported that the book was unsurpassed as a sociological study. From 1962 to 1972, Lincoln served as an adjunct or visiting professor at several American colleges and universities, including Portland State College (now Portland State University) in Oregon and Union Theological Seminary and Fordham University in New York City. During this period, he published five more books, including My Face is Black (1964), in which he offered readers a stark analysis of racism and civil rights in the United States.

In 1970, Lincoln became the founding president of the Black Academy of Letters. Three years later, he returned to Fisk as Professor of Religion and of Sociology and also as chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophical Studies. In 1976, Lincoln accepted a position at Duke University as Professor of Religion and Culture and taught there until his retirement in 1993. In 1991, he was named the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion and Culture.

Lincoln's health began to decline in the 1980s, and he was diagnosed with diabetes. Although the disease affected his eyesight, it did not affect his productivity. He published another landmark work, Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma (1984), which examined the contradictions between the American religious ideals of love and brotherhood and the betrayal of those ideals in many areas of American life. Lincoln's failing eyesight forced him to restrict his teaching duties at Duke, but in early 1987 he wrote, in just 60 days, The Avenue, Clayton City (1988), a novel dedicated to his friend and fellow civil rights author Alex Haley; it won the Lillian Smith Award for Best Southern Fiction in 1988 as well as the International Black Writers' Alice Browning Award in 1989.

In the final decade of his life, despite ill health, Lincoln continued to write, lecture, and publish. Among the two dozen books he wrote or edited, the best known was The Black Church in the African-American Experience, published in 1990 and co-written with Lawrence H. Mamiya. An analysis of the major black denominations that faulted the groups for ignoring African American men and their high criminalization rates, it is considered the definitive work on the topic.

In 1990, he received a citation from Pope John Paul II for his scholarly contribution to the church. In 1996, Lincoln published his most personal work, Coming Through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America, a searing analysis of the contemporary meanings of race and color in which he argued that all people are basically the same with the same vulnerabilities, the same possibilities, and the same need for God and each other. In this book, as in his other works, he makes a plea for "no-fault reconciliation," urging all people to embrace their shared humanity and work together for the greater good.

Achievements

• Lincoln's novel, The Avenue, Clayton City, won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Best Southern Fiction in 1988 and the International Black Writers' Alice Browning Award in 1989. In 1990 he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 1990, he was cited by Pope John Paul II for "scholarly service to the church."

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Black Muslims in America

    (This new edition of Lincoln's classic study details the f...)

    1961
  • The Black Church in the African American Experience

    (Black churches in America have long been recognized as th...)

  • Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma

    (A classic work on religion and the racial problems of mod...)

    1984
  • Coming through the Fire

    (In Coming through the Fire, prominent scholar and writer ...)

    1996
  • The Avenue, Clayton City

    (The Avenue in C. Eric Lincoln’s fictional town is the pri...)

    1988
  • The Black experience in religion 1974
  • My Face Is Black 1964
  • This Road Since Freedom 1990

Religion

Lincoln was one of the first scholars to study African-American Islam and understand the African-American church and mosque cultures. Lincoln challenged the prevailing research on the black church, which tended to portray it as a little different from white congregations.

His 1990 book on the black church was based on interviews with more than 2,000 ministers and his observations on the major black denominations, including Baptists, African Methodist Episcopal, and AME Zion. He called the black church a sleeping giant, handicapped by disunity, poor management and lack of a common vision. Its lassitude, he said, had tragic dimensions.

Views

Throughout his career, Lincoln wrote exhaustively about the impact of race, “the peculiar phenomena that met me everywhere I went,” from the boy who sold nickel bags of cotton to the accomplished scholar who earned several university degrees.

Quotations: "The Black Church has no challenger as the cultural womb of the black community. Not only did it give birth to new institutions such as schools, banks, insurance companies, and low-income housing, it also provided an academy and an arena for political activities, and it nurtured young talent for musical, dramatic, and artistic development."

"If the black church has no potential, then God help us because I do not see any other source upon which help is going to come quickly."

"In a society where a quarter of all young black men are likely to be criminalized before age 30, the black church has been too silent, both to its own detriment and the detriment of the black community and society at large."

Membership

In 1970, Lincoln became the founding president of the Black Academy of Letters. Lincoln was also a member of Sigma Pi Phi fraternity.

• 

  Sigma Pi Phi

• 

  President

  The Black Academy of Arts and Letters

  1973

Personality

Despite the setbacks of manifest segregation and prejudices of the Jim Crow era, young Lincoln developed tenacity and a strong sense of self-expression at an early age.

When Lincoln was 13, his grandfather became gravely ill, and Lincoln picked cotton to help support the family. In Coming Through the Fire (1996), Lincoln describes being brutally beaten when he questioned the amount of money he received for 40 pounds of cotton, an experience he never forgot.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Eric was one of the first scholars, perhaps the very first black scholar, to take the Black Muslim movement seriously and give it the exposure it deserved in that time frame when black people were struggling to define their place as Americans. And he did it not as a propagandist but as a scholar. He was a sociologist." - William Pannell

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  baseball

Connections

Sometime before 1960, Lincoln married; the couple had two children but divorced before 1961. Lincoln was married twice and had two children by each of his wives.

Mother:

Bradonia Lincoln

Spouse:

Lucy Cook

grandmother:

Mattie Sowell Lincoln

Grandfather:

Charles Less Lincoln

Friend:

Martin King

Friend:

Malcolm Little

Lincoln became friends with Malcolm X when the two met in Atlanta the summer after his book on Black Muslims came out. The last contact he had with the Muslim leader was a disturbing phone call in 1965 in which he invited Malcolm to lecture at Brown. Malcolm’s reply was that he would “do anything you ask me to do if I’m alive. [But soon] I may be dead.” A few days later, he was assassinated in a Harlem hotel.

Friend:

Alexander Haley

In early 1987 Lincoln wrote, in just 60 days, The Avenue, Clayton City (1988), a novel dedicated to his friend and fellow civil rights author Alex Haley.

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001