C. Eric Lincoln; Authority on Black Religious Life

C. Eric Lincoln, considered the foremost scholar of black religious life in America, died at Duke Hospital in Durham, N.C., Sunday. He was 75.

Lincoln had diabetes, but the cause of death was not immediately determined, according to a spokesman for Duke University, where Lincoln was an emeritus professor.

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.

“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,” he told an interviewer several years ago.

Lincoln gained national attention in 1961 with the publication of his first book, “The Black Muslims in America.” It was the first thorough sociological examination of the Black Muslim movement in the United States, which had been largely dismissed as a cult with no far-reaching political or social impact. Lincoln’s account helped give Malcolm X prominence, and the two men became friends.

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 five university degrees.

Lincoln was born to a poor family in Athens, Ala. His mother left him in the care of his grandparents when he was 4. He didn’t meet his father until he was 19. As a youngster, he 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.

After graduating, he went to Chicago where he intended to take a menial job arranged by a relative. Instead, 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 and master’s from Fisk and Boston universities. He received his doctorate from Boston College in 1960. He became a United Methodist minister.

Along the way, he worked at an array of jobs, from being the first black sales representative for Pepsi-Cola to road manager of the Birmingham Black Barons, a Negro League team that lured a Fairfield, Ala., teenager named Willie Mays out of high school to play baseball.

Lincoln eventually turned to academia, teaching at several institutions, including Brown University and the University of Ghana, before joining the Duke faculty in 1976.

He 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.

“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,” said William Pannell, a senior professor of preaching and former director of the African American ministries program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. “And he did it not as a propagandist but as a scholar. He was a sociologist.”

Over the next decade, Lincoln challenged the prevailing research on the black church, which tended to portray it as 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.

“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.”

His last book, in 1996, was “Coming Through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America,” a compilation of essays on topics from the O.J. Simpson trial to Louis Farrakhan that was laced with autobiographical reflections.

He wrote a novel, “The Avenue: Clayton City,” published by William Morrow, that received the 1988 Lillian Smith Book Award for best Southern fiction. He also was the author of several hymns. He is survived by his wife, Lucy Cook, and four children.