W.E.B. Du Bois, in an editorial entitled, "The White Christ," published in the March 1915 issue of Crisis, held up the "gyrations of evangelist Billy Sunday" as a manifestation of "white Christianity's irrelevance and moral degeneracy." The flamboyant Sunday, who was America's leading evangelist in the years between D.L. Moody in the late nineteenth century and the emergence of Billy Graham in the mid twentieth century, excluded racial injustice from the sins he denounced. In 1917 he again came under fire in the pages of Crisis, this time from black ministers in New York for excluding them from meaningful participation in plans for his citywide evangelistic campaign (see Ronald C. White, Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, pp. 184-185).
Sunday's plans for a campaign in Washington in January 1918, prompted a proposal in the pages of the Washington Bee that the city's black churches throw their support behind an alternative citywide revival, and invite Lewis C. Sheafe, who was endeavoring to establish a school in Jacksonville, Florida at the time, to be the speaker. The proposal came from J.C. Cunningham, a frequent correspondent to the Bee, whose epistles sometime appeared on the front page as well as the "letters to the editor" section. In the excerpt below, from the October 13 issue, Cunningham calls for Sheafe's return to counter Sunday, describing the former as "the greatest evangelist and singer the race has produced."
Two weeks before, in the Bee for September 29, Cunningham, after satirical comments directed towards another minister, paid a glowing farewell tribute to Sheafe:
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