It was short-lived in white churches. Possibly because of their upper class orientation, they were not ready to accept these ideas.

However, in the early 1900s the idea that socialism was indeed compatible with religion found support in Black churches. There were discussions of socialist ideas in the pages of publications aimed at Black congregates like the "Christian Recorder" and the "AME Church Review."

In his speeches and writings Woodbey declared, "If we are able to show that the Bible opposes both rent, interest and profits and the exploiting of the poor, then it stands just where socialists do."

Woodbey was born a slave in Tennessee in 1854. Self-educated, he worked in many unskilled jobs until the age of 20 when he was ordained as a Baptist minister in Kansas. He ran for office on the Prohibitionist ticket in 1896. It was in that year he read Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the "Appeal to Reason," a publication of the Socialist Party. He campaigned for the Democratic Party but in his speeches he espoused the ideas of Eugene Debs.

Eventually, Woodbey resigned his pulpit, but not his religious beliefs, to dedicate his life to the socialist movement. It is evident that his writings were as popular as his speeches. Persuaded to put his beliefs in writing he wrote one of the most popular pieces of the time. His "What to Do and How to Do It, or Socialism vs. Capitalism," addressed to working people, corrected misconceptions about socialism. He understood that economic changes only come about by changing thought patterns.

"It has been well said that the cooperative commonwealth," he wrote, "must first be built in the minds of people before it can be put into actual practice."

One of the contradictions of the early socialist movement was that its adherents were convinced that socialism would solve the problems of the whole working class, Black and white.

Thus, they did not believe in carrying on struggles against disenfranchisement, segregation, lynching and peonage in the South. It wasn’t until the establishment of the Communist Party USA in 1919 that the struggle for equal rights for Black Americans became a central activity of a radical party.

Woodbey and others did identify Blacks and women as the worst off under capitalism and argued that socialism was in their best interests. In an speech in Los Angeles, Woodbey polemicized against Booker T. Washington’s "Capitalists Argument for the Negro." He recognized Washington as a gentleman, but tellingly observed that "he has all the ability necessary to make a good servant of capitalism by educating other servants of capitalism."

As a street corner speaker, Woodbey participated in many battles with the authorities for the right of free speech. In 1907 an economic crisis was gripping the country with the usual increase in unemployment.

Street corner meetings were held to demand relief for the unemployed. These meetings were attacked by the police and brutally suppressed. This did not faze Woodbey and he was repeatedly beaten and arrested. In addition he was arrested for selling socialist booklets.

His pronouncement on the police is valid today. "The police," he said, "are the watchdogs of capitalism."

Indeed after what we have witnessed at the "Battle in Seattle" and the police actions in such strikes as the one on the waterfront in Charleston, S.C., Woodbey’s characterization is true today.

His prediction, in the early 1900s, that American capitalism would export jobs to the "Orient" shows that he had studied and mastered Marxism and demonstrates his ability to apply it to the American experience.

His writings are important to us today because he clearly saw that racism and the oppression of the working class had a single source – the economic system. In a forward to a collection of works by Woodbey and other Black Socialist preachers, former U.S. Rep. Ronald Dellums states, "Reverend Woodbey saw that it was not enough to seek entry into the system. We must change the system."

More information and articles can be found in Black Socialist Preacher, edited by Phillip Foner (Synthesis Publication, San Francisco, 1983).

Allan Stoehr is a trade union activist and reader from New York City.