ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Science of Black Methodism

• In Event: Science, Politics, and the Nation

English Abstract

In America by Design, David Noble argues that the university-trained engineer of the late 19th and early 20th century deployed science in service of industry-aligned research, with “novelty” as a keyword linking knowledge and capitalism. His analysis rests on Western knowledge traditions that cast “progress” as both moral and material destiny, a positivist stance that frames science as an extension of Protestant values, exercised through witnessing and experimentation. This paper reorients that narrative by examining Protestant science during the Reconstruction era as practiced and defined by Black scientists, educators, and inventors. Rooted in Black epistemologies, this intellectual history demonstrates how the same tools of science were mobilized under radically different conditions: conversations across the academic color line were materially and socially confined by race, yet they produced outcomes that challenged linear notions of progress and reimagined the moral purpose of scientific practice. By foregrounding Black practitioners, this study complicates Noble’s account of engineering and industrial modernity, revealing Reconstruction-era science as a contested terrain where Protestant values, racialized exclusion, and Black knowledge traditions intersected.

Author

• Kelcey Gibbons, MIT