c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As a teen growing up in his native Alabama, the venerable scholar C. Eric Lincoln would glean cotton from nearby fields as a way to pay for his high school textbooks. One day he was cheated of his wages. When he complained about the dollar count, he was knocked to the ground.

“Ain’t no nigger can count behind a white man,” the cotton gin owner told him.

That humiliating encounter, recounted in one of his books, was one of many that drove Lincoln to excel in school and made him the distinguished sociologist of black religion he later became. Lincoln, who spent his last years as professor emeritus at Duke University, died May 14 at 75. He was regarded by many as the most significant black religion scholar in the second half of the 20th century.

“Racism backfired because the lunacy of it motivated people in such a powerful way,” said W.C. Turner, associate professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School and a student and friend of Lincoln’s.

During his prolific career, Lincoln wrote 22 books, including several accounts of the black religious experience, but also a novel, books of poetry, church hymns and philosophical ruminations. He was remembered at a church service at the Duke University Chapel in Durham, N.C., on Thursday (May 18) as a Renaissance man, not only in his scholarly interests but in his passion for racial reconciliation.

In academic circles, though, Lincoln may best be remembered for elevating the role of black church studies.

“He brought black religion into the academic arena as a respected institution and as a respected discipline,” said Henry Whelchel, chairman of the department of religion and philosophy at Clark Atlanta University, where Lincoln also taught.

When he began his academic career in the 1950s, black theology and preaching were just beginning to be recognized by academia, but there was little data on the African-American church and few credible studies from the perspective of social science. Lincoln, who received his doctorate in sociology from Boston University, changed all that.

His first book, “The Black Muslims in America,” written in 1961, examined the growth and appeal of the Nation of Islam, the movement founded by Elijah Muhammad and popularized by Malcolm X. No one had ever studied the movement, but Lincoln brought it out from the shadows and showed how it offered young black men a positive, African-American identity.

He is perhaps best known for his 1990 classic, “The Black Church in the African American Experience,” written with his former student Lawrence Mamiya. The 520-page tome was encyclopedic in its reach, encompassing the black religious experience from its African roots to the growth of black Baptist and Methodist denominations to the urban church experience. Along the way, he provided data on clergy income and education, church size and Sunday school membership.

“He laid out the meaning of the black church as a place where African-Americans felt at home and as a resource from which to mount their protest against the social structures and the virulent notion of race,” said Charles Long, a professor emeritus of the history of religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

But Long said Lincoln’s social analysis was never purely academic.

“He knew that social science, even as a scientific discipline, had to take a stand with regard to the status quo of our society,” Long said. “He wanted a science that would begin a reformation of society.”

Lincoln was one of the first to point out the exodus of black males from the church and the tremendous organizational power of laywomen, which, in some cases, was turning young men away from church. He concluded that churches should provide more relevant programs for youth.

While spending a year as visiting professor at Clark University in 1993, Lincoln was accused of assaulting a graduate student with intent to rape. He was acquitted of all charges but one _ a single misdemeanor count of assault and battery. He continued to deny he ever hurt the student, and friends and colleagues defended him.

To many younger black scholars, Lincoln was a mentor and friend.

James Cone, a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, said he met Lincoln in 1967 at a conference and asked him to read a paper he had written. Lincoln did, and later published it in a collection of essays.

Later, when Cone told him he wanted to be just like him, Lincoln encouraged him to be himself.

“It was exactly what I need to hear _ that I need to follow my own course instead of imitating him,” Cone said.

At Thursday’s memorial, Lincoln was also remembered for the overarching dilemma at the center of his life and work _ that of race and the difficult negotiations between blacks and whites.

An ordained United Methodist minister, Lincoln was a founding member of Reconciliation United Methodist Church in Durham, a multiracial church he and his wife, Lucy Cook, attended. Lincoln wrote hymns for the church and, though he was in declining heath due to diabetes, high blood pressure and a heart condition, did his best to attend.

“He told me he had dreamed all his life that this was the kind of church he wanted to be a part of,” said the Rev. Lawrence Johnson, the co-pastor. “If he were to start his ministry over, this was the place he would want to be.”

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