THE new stage reached in the development of religious freedom in America in securing toleration for the evangelical denominations, meant the increasing importance of the Negro in the church. Given access to the people in all parts of the country by virtue of this new boon resulting from the struggle for the rights of man, the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians soon became imbued with the idea of an equality of the Negro in the church although they did not always militantly denounce slavery. Negroes were accepted in these congregations on this basis and when exhibiting the power of expounding the scriptures were sometimes heard with unusual interest. Such elevation of the blacks by these more liberal denominations, of course, incurred the displeasure and opposition of the aristocratic churchmen to the extent that these liberal denominations could not grant the Negroes as much freedom of participation in the church work as they were disposed to do.

In those cases in which Negroes were permitted to preach, they found themselves confronting not only the opposition of the more aristocratic sects but violating laws of long standing, prohibiting Negro ministers from exercising their gifts. When their ministrations were of a local order, and they did not seemingly stir up their fellow men to oppose the established order of things, not so much attention was paid to their operations. When, however, these Negroes of unusual power preached with such force as to excite not only the blacks but the whites, steps were generally taken to silence these speakers heralding the coming of a new day. This opposition on the part of the whites apparently grew more strenuous upon the attainment of independence. As British subjects, they had more feeling of toleration for the rise of the Negro in the church than they had after the colonies became independent. While struggling for liberty themselves, even for religious freedom, these Americans were not willing to grant others what they themselves desired. The attitude of most Americans then, unlike that of some of the British, seemed to be that the good things of this life were intended as special boons for a particular race.

The efforts to establish the early churches of South Carolina and Georgia are cases in evidence. The first Negro Baptist Church in America, according to Dr. W. H. Brooks, was founded by one Mr. Palmer at Silver Bluff across the river from Augusta, Georgia, in the colony of South Carolina, some time between the years 1773 and 1775. This group was fortunate in having the kind master, George Galphin, who became a patron of this congregation. He permitted David George to be ordained for this special work after having formerly allowed George Liele to preach there during these early years. Upon the evacuation of Savannah by the Americans in 1778, the Silver Bluff Church was driven into exile. Called upon to decide whether they would support the American or British cause, friend separated from friend and sometimes master from slave. When Galphin, a patriot, abandoned his slaves in his flight for refuge from the British, David George and fifty of these slaves went over to the British in Savannah where they were freed. David George returned to South Carolina and resided for a time in Charleston, from which he went, in 1782, to Nova Scotia, where he abode for ten years, preaching to Baptist congregations at Shelburne, Birchtown, Ragged Island, and in St. John, New Brunswick. Because of the inhospitable climate, the Negro slaves who had escaped with their loyal masters crossing the Canadian border to these points in Nova Scotia, went in 1792 to Sierra Leone where they constituted themselves a colony, with David George the founder of their first Baptist Church. After peace was made in 1783, the Silver Bluff Church was revived under the direction of the Rev. Jesse Peter who, unlike George Liele in having departed with his master when the British evacuated Savannah in 1782, remained as a slave here in South Carolina to carry forward the work across the river from Augusta in South Carolina.

According to Dr. Walter H. Brooks, a portion of this Silver Bluff Church brought into Savannah, Georgia, at the time of the departure of certain Americans to join the British in 1778, took shape as an organized body under George Liele, who had been the servant of a British officer. It is highly probable that David George and Jesse Peter, who had served these people at Silver Bluff, did not have sufficient influence to secure a permit to preach to them in Savannah, although they did unite with the church there. Out of this effort of George Liele developed what Dr. Brooks considers the first Negro Baptist Church in the city of Savannah, which flourished during the British occupancy from 1779 to the year 1782. The oldest Negro Baptist Church in this country, however, was that of the Silver Bluff Church which, in another meeting place and under a new name, became established at Augusta, having existed from the year 1773 to 1793 before the time of Andrew Bryan's organizing efforts in Savannah.

The struggles of George Liele and Andrew Bryan throw additional light on these early efforts. George Liele was born in Virginia about the year 1750, but soon moved with his master, Henry Sharpe, to Burke County, Georgia, a few years before the Revolutionary War. As his master was a deacon of the Baptist church of which Matthew Moore was pastor, George, upon hearing this minister preach from time to time when accompanying his owner, became converted and soon thereafter was baptized by this clergyman. Not long thereafter upon discovering that he had unusual ministerial gifts, this church permitted him to preach upon the plantations along the Savannah river and sometimes to the congregation of the white church to which he belonged. As his master was much more liberal than most of his kind, Liele was permitted to extend his operations down the Savannah river as far as Brampton, Savannah, and Yamacraw, where he preached to the slaves.

His ministerial work became so important that his master finally liberated him that he might serve without interference; but his work was interrupted by the Revolutionary War, during which his master was killed. Upon the death of his master, moreover, some of the heirs to the estate, not being satisfied with the manumission of George Liele, had him thrown into prison, hoping to reënslave him; but Colonel Kirkland, of the British Army, then in control of Savannah, came to his rescue by securing his release from prison. When the British evacuated that city, George Liele went with them to Jamaica, indenturing himself to Colonel Kirkland as a servant for the amount of money necessary to pay his transportation. 1

1 Departing under similar circumstances at the same time, went Rev. Mr. Amos, a product of the same Christian environment, directing his course to New Providence, Bahama Islands, British West Indies, where he established a flourishing Baptist Church.

When George Liele landed at Kingston he was, upon the recommendation of Colonel Kirkland to General Campbell, the Governor of Jamaica, employed to work out the money for which he had been indentured. Upon discharging the debt he obtained for himself and family a certificate of manumission and was free in 1784 to begin his work as a preacher. He preached first in a private home to a small congregation and then organized a church with four men who had emigrated from the American colonies. Delivering with power a message of such telling effect as the first dissenter to undertake the establishment of a liberal sect in the midst of communicants of the established church of England, he soon found his meetings interrupted and himself cruelly persecuted. Frequently memorialized for a grant of religious freedom, however, the Jamaica Assembly finally permitted George Liele to proceed with his work. Within a few years he had a following of about 500 communicants, and with the help of a number of inspired deacons and elders extended the work far into the rural districts. In addition to his ministerial work he administered the affairs of these various groups, taught a free school, and conducted a business at which he earned his living.

At first this work was largely inspirational, stirring up the people here and there; and many thought that it would be a movement of short duration: but becoming convinced that this was the real way of salvation and life, persons adhering to this new creed contributed sufficiently to its support to give it a standing in the community. Within a few years we hear of the purchase for a sum of nearly 155 pounds of about three acres of land at the east end of Kingston, on which they built a church. When success had crowned his efforts in Jamaica, he took steps toward the establishment of an edifice at Spanish Town, which was completed a few years later. The records show too that he interested in his cause some men of influence like Mr. Steven A. Cook, a member of the Jamaica Assembly, who solicited funds for him in England. Of him Mr. Cook bears this testimony: “He is a very industrious man, decent, humble in his manners, and, I think, a good man.” Contemporaries speak of his family life as pleasant. He had a wife and four children, three boys and a girl. He was not a well educated man, but he found time to read some good literature.

THE facts set forth above easily lead to the conclusion that the rise of the Negroes in the church was impeded by connection with their self-styled superiors. At first the whites had seriously objected to the evangelization of the Negroes, feeling that they could not be saved and, when the latter had been convinced of this error, many of them were far from the position of conceding to the blacks equality in their church organizations. Negroes in certain parts, however, were at first accepted in the congregations with the whites and accorded equal privileges. During the American Revolution when there was a tendency to give more consideration to all persons suffering from restriction, this freedom was enlarged. After the reaction following the American Revolution when men ceased to think so much of individual or natural rights and thought more frequently of means and measures for centralized government, the Negroes, like most elements far down, were forgotten or ignored even by the church. In this atmosphere of superimposed religious instruction the Negro was called upon merely to heed the Word and live. Experience soon taught, however, that it is difficult for a people to maintain interest in a cause with the management of which they have nothing to do.

Having enjoyed for some time the boon of freedom in the church, moreover, the Negroes were loath to give up this liberty. The escape of a young Negro, a slave of Thomas Jones, in Baltimore County in 1793 is a case in evidence. Accounting for his flight his master said: “He was raised in a family of religious persons commonly called Methodists and has lived with some of them for years past on terms of perfect equality; the refusal to continue him on these terms gave him offense and he, therefore, absconded. He had been accustomed to instruct and exhort his fellow creatures of all colors in matters of religious duty.” Another such Negro, named Jacob, ran away from Thomas Gibbs of that same State in 1800, hoping to enlarge his liberty as a Methodist minister; for his master said in advertising him as a runaway: “He professed to be a Methodist and has been in the practice of preaching of nights.” Still another Negro preacher of this type, named Richard, ran away from Hugh Drummond in Anne, Arundel County, that same year, while another called Simboe escaped a little later from Henry Lockey of Newbern, North Carolina.

This was the beginning of something more significant. The free Negroes in the North began to assert themselves after the manumissions incident to the American Revolution, as they were not necessarily obligated to follow the fortunes of the white churches. Such self-assertion early culminated in the protest of Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Richard Allen was the very sort of man to perform this great task. He was born a slave of Benjamin Chew of Philadelphia but very soon thereafter was sold with his whole family to a planter living near Dover, Delaware, where he grew to manhood. Coming under Christian influence, he was converted in 1777 and began his career as a minister three years later. Struck with the genuineness of his piety, his master permitted him to conduct prayers and to preach in his house, he himself being one of the first converts of this zealous messenger of God. Feeling after his conversion that slavery was wrong, Allen's master permitted his bondmen to obtain their freedom. Allen and his brother purchased themselves for $2,000 in the depreciated currency of the Revolutionary War.

Richard Allen then engaged himself at such menial labor as a Negro could then find, cutting wood and hauling, while preaching at his leisure. Recognizing his unusual talent, Richard Watcoat on the Baltimore circuit permitted Allen to travel with him, and Bishop Asbury frequently gave him assignments to preach. Coming to Philadelphia in 1786, Allen was invited to preach at the St. George Methodist Episcopal Church and at various other places in the city. His difficulties, however, had just begun. Yet he could not but succeed because he was a man of independent character, strict integrity, business tact, and thrifty habits. When he spoke a word, it was taken at its face value. His rule was never to break a promise or violate a contract. 1

The special needs of his own people aroused him to action in their behalf. He said, “I soon saw a large field open in seeking and instructing my African brethren who have been a long forgotten people, and few of them attended public worship.” Starting a prayer meeting in Philadelphia, he soon had 42 members. Encouraged thus, he proposed to establish a separate place of worship for the people of color, but was dissuaded therefrom by the protest of the whites and certain Negroes unto whom he ministered, only three of whom approved his plan. Preaching at this church, however, with such power as to move his own people in a way that they had never been affected before, he attracted them in such large numbers that the management proposed to segregate the Negroes. When, moreover, the management of the church undertook to carry out this plan so drastically even to the extent of disturbing Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and William White by pulling them off their knees while they were in the attitude of prayer, the Negroes arose and withdrew from the church in a body.

This was the beginning of the independent Free African Society organized by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. It appeared that Jones and Allen soon had differing plans; for the former finally organized the African Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, while the majority of the persons seceding from the St. George Methodist Episcopal Church followed the standard of Allen in effecting the independent organization known as Bethel Church. Allen purchased an old building for the Bethel church and had it duly dedicated in 1794, when he organized a Sunday school and a day and night school, to which were sent regular ministers by the Methodist Conference. Richard Allen was ordained deacon by Bishop Asbury in 1799, and later attained the status of elder. Negroes of other cities followed this example, organizing what were known as African Methodist Episcopal churches in Baltimore; Wilmington; Attleboro, Pennsylvania; and Salem, New Jersey.

Having maintained themselves independently for some time, these African societies developed sufficient leaders to effect the organization of a national church. In Philadelphia there were in coöperation with Richard Allen such workers as Jacob Tapsico, Clayton Durham, James Champion, and Thomas Webster. In Baltimore there were Daniel Coker, Richard Williams, Henry Harding, Stephen Hall, Edward Williamson and Nicholson Gilliard; in Wilmington, Delaware, Peter Spencer, the popular leader of the Union Church of Africans, established in 1813; in Attleboro, Pennsylvania, Jacob Marsh, Edward Jackson and William Anderson; and in Salem, New Jersey, Peter Cuff. These met in Philadelphia on the 9th day of April, 1816, to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the moving spirits being Richard Allen, Daniel Coker and Stephen Hall, an intelligent layman of Baltimore, Maryland. Equally interested in the same movement were Morris Brown, Henry Drayton, Charles Corr, Amos Cruickshanks, Marcus Brown, Smart Simpson, Henry Bull, John Matthews, James Eden, London Turpin and Alexander Harper of Charleston, who could not attend because of the restrictions there upon the travel of Negroes and the effort in the South to proscribe the independent church movement among persons of color.

The most important transaction of the Philadelphia meeting was the election of the bishop. Upon taking the vote the body declared Daniel Coker bishop-elect; but for several reasons he resigned the next day in favor of Richard Allen, who was elected on the 10th and consecrated the following day by regularly ordained ministers. The conference resolved, moreover, that the people of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and all other places, who might unite with them should become one body under the name of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Hoping that this national church might have accessions from other ranks in which the Negroes were not welcome or at best tolerated, this conference passed a resolution to the effect that ministers coming from another evangelical church should be received in the same standing which they held in the connection from which they came. This body adopted a book of discipline with its articles of religion and general rules just as it had been drafted by the Wesleyans, following the general principles of government as had been in vogue among the Methodists already. The church then began its career with seven itinerants and Bishop Allen as the exponents of a new thought.

Much progress thereafter was noted. The Baltimore district under the direction of Daniel Coker reported 1,066 members in 1818, 1,388 in 1819, 1,760 in 1820, and 1,924: in 1822, while there were in Philadelphia about 4,000. With the establishment of the New York conference the limits of the connection extended eastward as far as New Bedford, westward to Pittsburgh and southward to Charleston, South Carolina. Thereafter, however, there was little hope of success in the South. The African Methodists had with some difficulty under the leadership of Rev. Morris Brown established in Charleston a church reporting 1,000 members in 1817, and increasing by 1822 to 3,000 in spite of the intolerant laws and the police regulations making it difficult for slaves and free persons of color to attend. In 1822, however, because of the spirit of insurrection among Negroes following the fortunes of Denmark Vesey, who devised well laid plans for killing off the masters of the slaves, the African Methodists were required to suspend operation. Their pastor, Morris Brown, was threatened and would have been dealt with foully, had it not been for the interference of General James Hamilton, who secreted Brown in his home until he could give him safe passage to the North, where he very soon reached a position of prominence, even that of bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Another secession of the Methodists from the white connection was in progress in other parts. A number of Negroes, most of whom were members of the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church, in New York City, took the first step toward separation from that connection in 1796. They had not been disturbed in their worship to the extent experienced by Richard Allen and his coworkers in Philadelphia, but they had a “desire for the privilege of holding meetings of their own, where they might have an opportunity to exercise their spiritual gifts among themselves, and thereby be more useful to one another.” Such permission was obtained from Bishop Francis Asbury by a group of intelligent Negro Methodists, chief among whom were Francis Jacobs, William Brown, Peter Williams, Abraham Thompson, June Scott, Samuel Pontier, Thomas Miller, William Miller, James Varick and William Hamilton. Three of these persons, Abraham Thompson, June Scott, and Thomas Miller, were at that time recognized preachers, and William Miller was an exhorter, all of them officiating in this capacity as opportunities presented themselves in their connection and under the supervision of the white Methodists.

These workers continued in this situation until the year 1799, when, with a further increase in the Negro membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City, they proposed to build a separate house of worship rather than merely hold separate meetings in the edifice belonging to the white Methodists. A meeting was held soon thereafter and arrangements were made for the purchase of a lot in Orange Street, between Cross and Chatham, on which after having paid the amount of $50, they found out that the title was involved and they thereafter purchased a site situated at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets and fronting on Church Street. Upon this site they erected a building in the year 1800, naming the edifice the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Their white friends, seeing that they were determined to be a separate body, appointed as their adviser Rev. John McClaskey, who instructed them how to proceed in drawing up the articles of government. A charter was secured in 1801 and bears the signatures of Peter Williams and Francis Jacobs.

This church had not proceeded very far before there arose some dissension in the ranks. The first exhibition of this was the effort of two of the founders, Abraham Thompson and June Scott, who, “induced by the expectation of filthy lucre,” tried to form a society separate from the Zion church. In this they were aided by a white man who desired to exercise his own spiritual gifts, the opportunity for which he could not secure among his own people who belonged to the Society of Friends, from which he had been expelled. This new organization was finally effected as the Union Society. Very soon thereafter Abraham Thompson repented of his action and abandoned the attempt, leaving June Scott to continue the work of the Union Society by himself. As he was unable to bear the expenses thereafter the society was consequently broken up and June Scott attached himself to another church.

Another obstacle appeared in 1813 when Thomas Simpkins, upon being expelled from the Zion Church, of which he had been a member and a trustee, undertook to establish a new society. He drew to himself William Miller, who had been ordained deacon in the Zion Church. Obtaining thereafter a site in Elizabeth Street, they succeeded in persuading a number of members of the Zion Church to unite with them to establish the Asbury Church. Unlike the unsuccessful attempt of Abraham Thompson and June Scott in forming the Union Society, the Asbury Church became permanently established. Desiring, however, to be regular in their operations, the members of the Asbury Church found themselves compelled to appeal to the same ecclesiastical authorities and to accept practically the same government as that already instituted for the Zion Church. This church was thereafter received in the Methodist Church. Although this was considered a very bad omen for the Zion Church, however, it continued to make progress in spite of expectations to the contrary. The members of the church decidedly increased and steps were taken for the construction of a house with a school room underneath on the site of the old meeting house. On the 25th of November there began the construction of a more suitable building which was completed by 1820.

Another disturbing factor appeared in the scheme of William Lambert. He had been a member of the Zion Church and seceded with those who formed the Asbury connection. Because the Zion Church refused to appoint him as a minister, and even Asbury refused to hear him preach, he returned from Philadelphia where he had been under the influence of Bishop Richard Allen, from whom he had obtained a license to preach, and endeavored to establish a church for Bishop Allen's denomination. He obtained a school house in Mott Street, and with the assistance of Rev. Mr. White, a member and an ordained deacon, it was fitted for a church. In the meantime Bishop Allen was in touch with some of the official brethren in New York City with a view to extending the jurisdiction

AN important factor in the growth of the Negro Church was that the Negroes found the white churches of their choice less friendly and finally saw them withdrawn from the churches in the North to perpetuate slavery. In the South, the slaves and free Negroes had to accept whatever religious privileges were allowed them; but when the national bodies grew lukewarm on abolition, receded from the advanced position which they had taken in the defense of the Negro, and persistently compromised on the question to placate their southern adherents to maintain intact their national organizations, Negroes forgot the stigma attached to their radical religious bodies and united freely with their brethren who during the first years of their independence found it difficult to secure a following.

In 1808 the general conference of the Methodists provided that the annual conferences should form their own regulations relative to buying and selling slaves, thus making it possible for the body of preachers to act efficiently in one direction against slavery, even should the general conference choose wholly to refrain. This rule was abrogated in 1820, however, and the only important changes made thereafter with reference to the Negroes were some rules adopted in 1824, one of which provided that all preachers should prudently “enforce upon their members,” the necessity of teaching their slaves to read the word of God, and to allow them time to attend upon the public worship of God on our regular days of divine service. Another rule provided that Negro preachers and official members should have all the privileges which are usual to others in the district and quarterly conferences, where the usages of the country did not forbid it, and that the presiding elder might hold for them a separate district conference, when the number of Negro local preachers would justify it. The annual conferences might employ Negro preachers to travel and preach, where their services were judged necessary, provided that no one should be so employed without having been recommended according to the form of discipline.

The Presbyterians had tried to evade the Negro question but it was again brought up in view of the cruelty practiced in the traffic of slaves during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The General Assembly was forced to take some action again in 1815. It then referred to its previous resolutions on the subject and expressed regret that slavery of Africans existed, hoping too that such measures might be taken as would secure religious education at least to the rising generation of slaves as a preparation for their emancipation at some time in the future. As to the transfer of slaves necessary in the economy of the slave States the General Assembly regarded this as unavoidable; but it denounced the buying and selling of slaves by way of traffic and all undue cruelty among them as inconsistent with the spirit of the Gospel, recommending it to the presbyteries and sessions in their care to make use of all measures to prevent such shameful conduct. In 1818 there came before this General Assembly a resolution to the effect that a person who should sell as a slave a member of the church, who should be at the time in good standing in the church and unwilling to be sold, acted inconsistently with the spirit of Christianity and ought to be debarred from the communion of the church.

After considerable discussion, the subject was submitted to a committee to prepare a report for the adoption of the General Assembly, embracing the object of the above resolution and also expressing the opinion of the Assembly as to slavery. This report, unanimously adopted, carried, among other things, a declaration that the voluntary enslaving of one portion of the human race by another is a gross violation of the most precious rights of human nature, utterly inconsistent with the law of God which requires us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and totally irreconcilable with the spirit and principles of the gospel of Christ, which enjoins that all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even unto them. 1

In another part of this report, however, the Assembly seemed to undo what it had done; for it exhorted others to forbear harsh censures, and uncharitable reflections on their brethren, who unhappily live among slaves whom they cannot immediately set free, but who, at the same time, are really using all their influence, and all their endeavors, to bring them into a state of freedom, as soon as a door for it can be safely opened. It also encouraged the members of the Society to patronize the American Colonization Society with a view to sending the Negroes to Africa and thus deliver themselves and their country from the calamity of slavery. The General Assembly recommended the encouragement of religious instruction of the slaves in the principles of the Christian religion, granting them liberty to attend on the preaching of the gospel, when they have opportunity, by favoring the instruction of them in the Sabbath schools wherever those schools should be formed and by giving them all other proper advantages for acquiring the knowledge of their duty both to God and man. The General Assembly further recommended that it was incumbent on all Christians to communicate religious instruction to those who are under their authority, so that the doing of this “in the case before us so far from operating as some have apprehended that it might, as an incitement to insurrection, would, on the contrary, operate as a most powerful means for the prevention of those evils.”

In this straddling position these churches tried to discountenance as far as possible all cruelty of whatever kind in the treatment of slaves, especially the cruelty of separating husband and wife, parents and children, and that which consisted in selling slaves to those who would either themselves deprive these unhappy people of the blessings of the gospel or who would transfer them to places where the gospel was not proclaimed, or where it was forbidden to slaves to attend upon its instruction. During the thirties most of these churches were taking the position of evading the question, but the abolition members therein kept the problem before them. Postponement of the discussion thereafter became the order of the day. One decade later many took the position assumed by the Presbyterian Church in 1845 when, as a result of various memorials on slavery, the Assembly, deploring the division of the church on slavery, passed a resolution that the church could not legislate where Christ has not legislated, that as Christ and the Apostles admitted slaveholders as members of the church, they could not be expected to do otherwise. Some disclaimed, however, any desire to deny that slavery is an evil, or to countenance the idea that masters may regard their slaves as real property and not as human beings. They merely intended to say that since Christ and his Apostles did not make the holding of slaves a bar to communion, the church organizations as the court of Christ had no authority to do so. The apostles of Christ sought to ameliorate the condition of the slaves, not by denouncing and excommunicating their masters but by teaching both masters and slaves the glorious doctrines of the gospel and enjoining upon each a discharge of their relative duties. These sects rejoiced rather that the ministers and churches of the slaveholding States were awakening to a deeper sense of

The schism, however, was impending; for the southern members of the churches boldly defended slavery as justified by the scriptures, while many northerners differed from them. Ministers and laymen wrote works setting forth these doctrines while pseudo-scientists and philosophers undertook to justify the enslavement of the Negroes on the ground of racial inferiority. Southerners who would not go to the extent of justifying the institution on these untenable grounds merely deprecated it as an evil for which they were not responsible and of which they could not rid them selves. Richard Fuller, a southern Baptist of unusual influence in shaping the policy of that sect in his section, expressed this thought in the words: “I am willing to appear in any controversy which can even by implication place me in a false light and odious attitude representing me as a eulogist and abettor of slavery, and not as simply the apologist of an institution transmitted to us by former generations—the existence of which I lament— for the commencement of which I am not at all responsible—for the extinction of which I am willing to make greater sacrifices than any abolitionist has made or would make, if the cause of true humanity would be thus advanced.”

The outbreaks soon followed, however, in spite of efforts to heal the breach. There came from the Alabama State Baptist Convention a memorial with respect to the discrimination of the Foreign Mission Board against slaveholders in making its appointments. The reply of the Board was conciliatory but was to the effect that a slaveholder could not be consistently appointed as a missionary for the reason that such action would involve an approval of slavery. This and other Baptist conventions thereafter severed their connection with the national body, and in 1845 organized the Southern Baptist Convention. That same year occurred the secession of the Southern Methodists. That denomination had for years struggled with this question and had undertaken to maintain the position that slavery is an evil to be deplored and that ministers and bishops at least should abstain therefrom. When, in 1845, the Methodists undertook to discipline one of its bishops, James O. Andrew, charging him with holding slaves, the southern delegates stood by him and withdrew to organize the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1857, the Presbyterians who had all but compromised sufficiently to hold their national body intact gave an expression of opinion on the Fugitive Slave Law which so offended its southern members that they withdrew and formed the nucleus around which the Southern Presbyterian Church was established in 1861.

In spite of the reactionary tendencies of the white churches, however, no such thing as the independence of the Negro had ever been possible in the South and could not be so after the radical aspect which this movement assumed in the North. In slave States, the majority of Negroes became a decidedly neglected mass during the reaction, although many of them were nominally members of churches. When because of the insurrectionary movement led by certain blacks like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, it became unpopular to teach Negroes to read and the educated white persons were not willing to supply this lack of religious workers among the blacks, there was no longer hope for ordinary religious instruction. This reaction was unusually disastrous to the Negro preacher when it was noised abroad that Nat Turner was a minister. The rumor attached to Negro ministers throughout the South the stigma of using preaching as a means to incite their race to servile insurrection.

Some of the legislation enacted by the States after this great upheaval will indicate the extent to which this fear controlled the minds of the southern people. In 1832 Virginia passed a law to silence Negro preachers, making it impossible for them thus to function except in compliance with very rigid regulations and in the presence of certain discreet white men. In 1833, Alabama made it unlawful for slaves or free Negroes to preach unless before five respectable slaveholders and when authorized by some neighboring religious society. Georgia enacted a law in 1834 providing that neither free Negroes nor slaves might preach or exhort an assembly of more than seven unless licensed by justices on the certificate of three ordained ministers. Other Southern States soon followed the example of these, passing more drastic laws prohibiting the assembly of Negroes after the early hours of the night, and providing for the expulsion of all free Negroes from such commonwealths, so as to reduce the danger of mischief from the spread of information by this more enlightened class.

Thus circumscribed, the Negroes in the South had to follow their masters in religious matters. They continued to join the Methodist and Baptist churches, but constituted a part of a mixed membership worshiping under the same roof. The masters had long since learned that coincidence of religious belief on the part of the slave and the owner was a necessity in the economy of the slaveholding States. No master would look with favor upon seeing his slave proselyted or influenced by a minister whom he would not tolerate as his own spiritual adviser. Later there was not much commingling of the two races in the same meetings. White ministers preached to the Negroes in their special meetings or provided some Negro exhorter of power to supply that need, but only when such Negro minister's character had been thoroughly investigated and approved in accordance with the law and public opinion. Where there were not so very many Negroes in the churches, they were segregated in the gallery or certain pews, which they entered by a side door, as provided in the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple of Jehovah; but if there were many Negroes and very few whites in these congregations, they usually provided separate buildings or used the same edifices at different hours. The argument in favor of this segregation was that God in making the races different intended that they should be kept separate and distinct.

Where there was allowed much liberty in seating, very often grave problems arose. Such was the case in Charleston, South Carolina, in the Bethel Church in 1833 on an occasion when Dr. Capers was to preach. As more whites came than could be seated and the Negroes refused to vacate their customary seats, a number of uncouth young white men forcibly ejected them therefrom. Because one of the preachers a few days thereafter sharply criticized this action of the uncouth element they became unusually indignant, registering a protest against such censure. An effort was made to settle the matter by reconciliation, but when that failed, nine of the young men were expelled only to be followed by 150 others to form a new organization, which established connection with the Methodist Protestant Church.

This sort of segregation was common to all of the denominations alike. The Presbytery of Charleston, finding the church in that city unusually crowded in 1850, built a structure for the worship of the Negro membership, costing $7,700. The edifice was of the shape of a T to provide seats for the whites in the transepts. It had connected with it all of the facilities for religious instruction in the other churches with the exception that teaching was oral. The Episcopalians in that city, however, found it more difficult to carry out such a policy in relieving the congestion of the Negro pews in St. Michael's and St. Phillip's. These communicants decided to build what was to be called the Calvary Church for the accommodation of the blacks who were then occupying temporary quarters in Temperance Hall. Because of certain radical action of the burial societies among the Negro communicants, however, the owner of Temperance Hall refused further to accommodate the Negroes and the Calvary Church was demolished while it was in the process of construction.

The Negroes seemed to have retained several separate places of worship in the State of Virginia, as in the case of Georgia. Among the churches established for Negroes at a very early period was that of Williamsburg, Virginia, organized exclusively for Negroes in 1776 and admitted as such to the Dover Baptist Association in 1791. Upon petitioning the state legislature in 1823, however, the Negroes were refused the permit to build a Baptist church in Richmond, although the one used by the whites was not sufficiently spacious to permit their attendance. In 1841, however, when the Baptist church was finally compelled to build a new structure to accommodate its increasing membership, they turned over to the Negroes for their special place of worship the old building in which they organized what is known as the first African Baptist Church under the pastorate of the Rev. Robert Ryland, a white man, who served during the same period as president of Richmond College. When this became unusually crowded the Ebenezer Baptist Church was organized by the overflow membership in 1855 and was controlled very much in the same way. There were flourishing Negro Methodist and Baptist churches in other parts during the forties, fifties, and sixties, conducted very much on the order of the First African Baptist Church in Richmond, or like the Anthony Street Church in Mobile, Alabama, in charge of the Rev. Keidor Hawthorne. In other centers in Virginia, however, the Negroes were proceeding almost independently. There was then a representative Baptist congregation in Portsmouth under the direction of the noted builder and organizer, E. G. Corpew. Rev. Mr. Morris, another pioneer in the work, was at this time leading forward the Court Street Baptist Church in Lynchburg. In 1837 and 1838 Sampson White was reported as a successful minister in charge of the Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, which as early as 1803 undertook to erect its first structure. Sampson White then went to Norfolk for a short stay in this inviting field, and in 1839 came to Washington and organized the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church.

In the District of Columbia, where, as in Maryland, the restrictions on Negroes were not so rigid as in some other parts of the South, the Negroes had numerous churches of the Baptist and Methodist faith, and under the leadership of John F. Cooke established, in 1843, the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.

Baltimore was no exception to this rule. As the slave and free membership freely mingled in that city they had, as early as 1835, ten congregations, and by 1847 thirteen, ten of which were Methodist. The work of the Baptists had been largely promoted by M. C. Clayton, the preacher of versatile genius, who founded the First African Church in that city in 1836, and by Noah Davis, a leader and organizer of much ability.

This favorable condition, however, obtained in the South only in those communities where the authorities winked at the violation of the law by free Negroes and where slaves enjoyed unusual privileges because their masters were a law unto themselves. In 1828 the Alabama Baptist Association conditionally purchased a slave named Caesar at the cost of $625 and sent him to preach the gospel and live among his people. He was then made the companion of the famous white evangelist, James McLemore, of much note in Alabama. Caesar was respected alike for piety and his ability as a preacher. Not infrequently he addressed audiences composed entirely of whites. Another slave of Alabama, Doc Phillips, was a Baptist preacher of a commanding influence among his people. The Tuskegee Association of that State undertook to purchase him that he might be appointed a missionary, but he declined to be severed from his master, who allowed him whatever time he might desire for preaching. So was this true of George Bentley of Giles County, Tennessee, a slave of unusual note, having attained distinction as a preacher of power, well versed in polemic theology. Out of a debate on baptism lasting more than four days he emerged victor over a white minister in that county challenging him to a discussion of the principles of baptism. He numbered among his communicants the best white people of the community, who paid him a salary of more than $600. He, like Doc Phillips, refused to have his congregation purchase his freedom, as he did not care to be separated from his kind master.

Here and there in the South, however, there developed certain Negro preachers better known to fame. A striking example of this class was Lott Cary, who was born a slave in Virginia. When quite young he was hired out and thereby came under the influences which caused him to be a man given to profane and intemperate habits, although his parents were of the higher class of slaves. In 1807, however, he was awakened by hearing a sermon from the third chapter of John on the interview of Nicodemus with our Saviour, from the words: “Notwithstanding what I say unto you, you must be born again.” So powerful was the preaching and so telling was the effect on the mind of this slave that he immediately secured a copy of the New Testament and almost miraculously learned to read by studying that chapter. Upon developing into a strong spiritual man, he was made superintendent of all the laborers in the tobacco warehouse in which he was working in Richmond. Not long thereafter he received permission to serve as an exhorter in the First African Baptist Church of that city, the membership of which, then being about 2,000, required the services of a number of assistant pastors.

Lott Cary reached a new stage in his development in the fall of 1813, when Luther Rice, who had just returned from the East, appeared in that city preaching rousing sermons urging the Baptists to enter upon and to support the work of missions in foreign fields. In November of that year the Richmond Foreign Missionary Society was organized and delegates were sent to Philadelphia the following spring to participate in the organization of the Baptist Triennial Convention. As this new body had for one of its objects mission work in foreign fields, the national interest aroused therein excited also a deep interest among the Negro members of the churches in Richmond. Two years later, therefore, the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society, with Lott Carey as the moving spirit, was formed with the sole object of sending the gospel into Africa. This society was composed of the Negro members of the First African Baptist Church and of other churches throughout the city. It held annual meetings and with their small donations accumulated as much as $700 during the first four years.

As no one volunteered to go abroad to extend this mission work, Lott Cary himself determined to go to Africa, accompanied by Collin Teague. They were, therefore, duly appointed by the Board of the Baptist Triennial Convention as missionaries to Liberia. In 1821 Cary and Teague with many others sailed from Norfolk for the land of their fathers beyond the Atlantic. Before leaving Richmond, Cary and wife, Teague and wife with their son Hillary, who later became editor of the Liberian Herald, and Joseph Sanford and his wife, formed what is called the First Baptist Church of Monrovia. This congregation was later designated as the mother of the Providence Baptist Association in Liberia.

BECAUSE such religious instruction as the Negroes received after the enactment and the enforcement of the reactionary legislation of the South failed to secure to them that mental development necessary to understand the Christian doctrine and to connect it with the practical problems of life, northern friends of the Negroes forced a change in their religious instruction by exposing the unchristian policy of preventing a people from learning of God through the only source of revelation, the Bible. Abolitionists like William Jay and many northern ministers who did not consider themselves anti-slavery, fearlessly branded as Sinners the so-called southern Christians who were thus preventing the coming of the kingdom of God. Southerners eloquently retorted on the defensive, of course, but believed in their hearts that the deplorable situation should be remedied. Much effort was made thereafter to render more thorough the oral instruction of slaves, but without very much success. Nearer the middle of the nineteenth century, however, there appeared among the clergy and sympathetic whites in the South some inclination to disregard the custom and laws of that section that the necessary foundation for the instruction of the Negroes in the Christian doctrine might be given.

In this work the evangelical denominations participated more freely than others. From the Episcopal Church to which most of the richest slaveholders belonged, not very much help came because that church never considered slavery a sin and never made it a matter of discipline. That the bodies of the Negroes were made miserable in this world and that their souls might be damned were of little concern to some persons, who were not especially interested in monopolizing heaven even for poor whites. The gospel, moreover, as some saw it, had little to do with the settlement of differences between the races in this world, since it was rather concerned with the adjustment of affairs in the kingdom to come.

There were among the Episcopalians, however, some striking exceptions to this rule. Among these should be mentioned Bishop Polk of Louisiana. In 1854, he informed Frederick L. Olmsted, who was then traveling through that country, that he had confirmed thirty black persons near the station assigned to the Legree estate, where the conditions sot forth in Uncle Tom's Cabin, he contended, did not obtain. Bishop Polk owned 400 slaves himself but endeavored to bring them up in a religious manner, baptizing all of their children and teaching them the catechism. “All without exception,” says Olmsted, “attend the church service, and the chanting is creditably performed by them in the opinion of their owner. Ninety of them are communicants, marriages are celebrated according to the church ritual, and the state of morals is satisfactory. Twenty infants had been baptized by the Bishop just before his departure from home, and he had left his whole estate, his keys and the like, in the sole charge of one of his slaves, without the slightest apprehension of loss or damage.” Referring further to the slaveholding of this minister of the gospel, Olmsted remarked that “in considering the position of this Christian prelate as a slaveholder, the English reader must bear in mind that by the laws of Louisiana emancipation had been rendered all but impracticable, and that if practicable it would not necessarily be in all cases an act of mercy or of justice.”

Taking up again the religious instruction of the slaves, Olmsted found “that there were widely different practices in that State.“ He observed that there were some other slaveholders who, like Bishop Polk, encouraged and even obliged their slaves to engage in religious exercises. Yet among the wealthier slave owners, and especially in that section of the country where the blacks outnumbered the whites, there was generally a visible and often an avowed distrust of the effect of religious exercises upon slaves and even the preaching of white clergymen to them was permitted by many only with reluctance. The prevailing impression among northern people with regard to the important influence of slavery in promoting the spread of religion among the blacks, he contended, was erroneous. Northern clergymen supposed as a general thing that there was a regular daily instruction of the slaves in the truths of Christianity. “So far as this is from being the case,” said Olmsted, “although family prayers were held in several of the fifty planters' houses in Mississippi and Alabama in which I passed a night, I never in a single instance saw a field hand attend or join in the devotions of the family.”

There should be mentioned also in this connection the services of Bishop Meade of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Virginia. Early in his career he addressed himself to the neglected condition of the Negroes, preaching rousing sermons, telling them their duty toward their own group. He was interested in the colonization movement and hoped to secure the release of certain recaptured Africans to encourage the manumission of others who might be given a chance to establish a nation for their race in Africa. Although thereafter he did not emphasize the emancipation of the slaves very much because of the reactionary influences at work in the country, he did advocate the thorough education of those slaves who were to be colonized abroad. As an impetus in this direction he republished the sermons of the Rev. Thomas Bacon, who answered every argument presented against the religious instruction of Negroes. He especially besought the ministers of the gospel to take into serious consideration a matter of which “they also will have to give an account.” “Did not Christ,” said he, “die for these poor creatures as well as for any others, and has he not given charge to the minister to gather his sheep into the fold?”

The Presbyterians, much more liberal in their attitude toward the blacks than the Episcopalians, manifested an unfailing interest in the condition of these people far down. Although the church as a national body receded from its early position of attacking slavery and thereafter compromised with the institution, there was among these people in the various parts of the country a continuous effort to promote the religious instruction of the Negroes. Early manifesting interest in the preparation of Negroes for colonization in Africa, the Presbyterians planned to bring out of the South Negroes liberated for expatriation that they might be first trained in a school for this purpose established at Parsippanny, New Jersey. As this failed, this church finally established for this purpose, in 1854, Ashmun Institute, now Lincoln University.

In the very heart of the South, however, the Presbyterians did not fail to aid the instruction of Negroes wherever public opinion permitted it, although they had to confine themselves largely to verbal instruction. In the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, where the Scotch-Irish element dominated, there was no diminution of ardor in the religious instruction of the Negroes. Expressions of interest came also from the Presbyterian synods of Georgia and Alabama, while those in the mountains openly advocated literary instruction as a preparation for thorough indoctrination. In the States of Maryland, Tennessee, and Kentucky, they were not handicapped by laws prohibiting the education of the Negroes. They, therefore, spoke out more boldly for the establishment of schools, and especially Sabbath schools, which paid as much attention to the teaching of reading as it did to the actual instruction in the Bible.

Among the Presbyterians in the South the most efficient worker was the Rev. C. C. Jones, who toiled among the Negroes in Georgia. Taking the situation as it was rather than complaining because it was not different, Jones addressed himself to the task of trying to convince the slave owners as to the advisability of religious instruction. He believed that if the circumstances of the Negroes were changed, they would equal if not excel the rest of the human family in religion, intellect, purity of morals and ardor of piety. He feared that white men would cherish a contempt for the Negroes which would cause them to sink lower in the scale of morality and religion. He, therefore, advocated the attendance of both races upon the same services that they might learn by contact from their masters. The independent church organization for which the Negroes contended, he believed, would rather give them an opportunity to deteriorate.

By a logical array of facts, moreover, he tried to prove that Negroes who had been instructed in the doctrines of Christianity had less tendency toward servile insurrection than those who had been left in heathenism. Even the Southampton insurrection started by Nat Turner, he believed, was due to the fact that, being unable to understand the real scheme of things, he had misguided the slaves by his false prophecy. Those Negroes who had been well instructed in the principles of Christianity had never been found guilty of any such crimes.

In this effort Jones had a very difficult task; for the tendency during that day was rather toward segregation in the church. Most southern men had no idea of elevating the Negroes to the status of white men, not even in matters of religion. The whites believed that the domestic element of the system of slavery itself afforded adequate means for their improvement and the natural safe and effective means of their elevation. In other words, their instruction must be decidedly different from that of white men, in regard to whom the term education had widely different significations. The best the Negro could hope for would be an imitation of the white man to call into action that peculiar capacity for copying the mental and moral habits of the superior race.

Jones's work did not differ materially from that of the Rev. Josiah Law of Georgia, who was almost as successful in grappling with the same problem. These workers, however, soon found that there was a strenuous objection even to the verbal instruction of Negroes for fear that the oral exercise would inspire a desire for literary training, which was out of harmony with the status of the Negro in a slaveholding commonwealth. Thinking that it might lead to such a state of affairs, most masters in some parts of the South opposed all instruction of Negroes during the thirties and forties.

Thereafter appeared occasional evidences of further interest in the religious instruction and the evangelization of the slaves and free people of color, however, in spite of this opposition. Much interest was manifested in this work by the Presbyterians of Charleston; Union, Georgia; Concord, South Alabama; and Mississippi. In 1825 the General Assembly went on record to the effect that “no more honored name could be conferred on a minister of Jesus than that of Apostle to the American slaves, and no service can be more pleasing to the God of Heaven, or more useful to our beloved country, than that which this title designates.”

THE situation in the North was then more encouraging, though far from being ideal. During the critical period through which the Negroes were passing between 1830 and the Civil War the Negro minister had to divide his attention so as to take care of all of the varying interests of an oppressed race. Among the poor it has never been considered exceptional for a minister to work at some occupation to increase the meager income which he receives from his parishioners. We have already observed above that Andrew Bryan made himself independent as a planter, that Richard Allen at first earned his living as a teamster, and that Andrew Marshall with much business acumen maintained himself in a local express business. During the critical period from 1830 to 1860, however, the Negro minister was not only compelled sometimes thus to support himself, but often had to devote part of his time to the problems of education, abolition, colonization and the Underground Railroad.

Education for the Negro was both a test and a challenge. Few persons believed that the Negro was capable of the mental development known to the white man. The challenge to them, then, was: Show that your race has possibilities in the intellectual world, bring forth proof to uproot the argument that your race is the inferior of the other peoples. To make the challenge more concrete, can a Negro master the grammar, language, and literature of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew? Can he learn to think? Can he understand the significant things of life as expounded by mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers? A few Negroes had demonstrated here and there unusual ability in these fields; but they were not generally known or their achievements were accounted for by their racial connection with the white race in this country or with some Arabic stock of Africa, known to be Caucasian rather than Negroid.

The greater impetus to education among Negro ministers, however, came not so much from the desire to meet this requirement as from the need of it in promoting the work of the church. It is true that the whites were subjecting the blacks to a mental test, but it required very little logic to show that the contention as to Negro inferiority was a case of making desire father to the thought. The independent church movement had to depend on education; and the Negroes themselves, as they made progress, required of their ministry the service of instructors to bring the people to a higher 169 standard of thought. Acquiring an education then was not always an easy task. Negroes had no advanced schools of their own and they were generally refused in most of those of the North. Until the rise of the Union Literary Institute in Indiana, Oberlin and Wilberforce in Ohio, Ashmun Institute in Pennsylvania, and Oneida Institute in New York, the Negro had to break his way into whatever institution of learning he entered. Negroes who were ignorant themselves could not always appreciate what the struggle for educational opportunities actually meant.

The Negro ministers, moreover, were at the same time in the midst of a life and death struggle. During the thirties and forties the questions involving the Negroes engaged the attention of almost everybody. The Negro ministers, the then best developed leaders among their people, could not be silent. Inasmuch as men had to be won to the support of the cause, these apostles to the lowly had to appear before the other race in the North as spokesmen of an oppressed people. Preaching was important enough, but there could be no preaching without the liberty to preach. Except in a few such cases as that of William Douglass, the rector of St. Thomas Church, Philadelphia, and that of Peter Williams, the rector of St. Phillips', in New York City, where the proslavery church hierarchy hushed the Negro ministers loyally speaking for their people, the Negro 170 clergyman spoke out fearlessly for the emancipation of his race and its elevation to citizenship.

As the American Colonization Society went only half way in carrying out this program in that it advocated the emancipation of the Negroes for deportation to Africa, merely to rid the country of freemen belonging to another than the Caucasian race, the Negro ministers were generally opposed to that organization. They fearlessly attacked the promoters of the cause, saying, “Here we were born, here we fought for the independence of this country, and here we intend to die and be buried in the soil hallowed by the blood of our fathers shed in defense of this country.” When, however, the increasing intelligence of the Negroes made their humiliation in this country less and less durable, the Negro ministers became divided among themselves on this important question; for a few of the leaders of that day began to advocate colonization in some other country than Africa.

In the meantime, moreover, almost every Negro minister was otherwise engaged in spiriting away fugitives from the slaveholding States through the North into Canada. They were in touch with men in other centers, found out what was going on, learned what was the trend of things, and planned to act accordingly. And well might they be so engaged; for not a few of these ministers were fugitives themselves, and whether or not their freedom had such origin, all Negroes in the North were, after the passage of that unconstitutional drastic Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, in danger of being apprehended and enslaved without what civilized countries regard as due process of law. Some of the ministers themselves had to move for safety into Canada during this crisis, carrying in some cases practically all of their congregations with them.

The Negro minister easily learned also the power of the press. Much time which they would have under other circumstances devoted to the edification of their flocks they had to spend in raising funds to purchase printing plants and in editing the publications issuing therefrom. They could deliver their message to their congregations, they could occasionally address thus groups of the other race; but their message needed a wider circulation in a more enduring form. There were, therefore, during this crisis few Negro ministers of literary attainments who did not either undertake to edit a newspaper or to contribute thereto. If they had a message worth while, the abolition papers would generally delight in publishing it. If they refused and the message was a burning one, the Negroes would establish an organ of their own.

To bring out this idea of the minister of divided interests serving his people in many ways, no career is more illuminating than that of Bishop Daniel A. Payne. Having been much better trained than most of his coworkers, he emphasized education as a necessary foundation for thorough work in the ministry. Taking this position, he made himself at first more of a teacher than a preacher, devoting most of his time to actual classroom instruction, hoping to raise the standard of the ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with which he finally cast his lot after being graduated at the Lutheran Seminary at Gettysburg. Taking this position, he had arrayed against him all the enemies of culture. One writer charged him with branding the ministry with infamy and with reckless slander on the general character of his own denomination. There was great fear that there might follow discord and dissolution between the ignorant and the intelligent portion of the church. Preaching to his congregation, the ignorant minister would often boast of having not rubbed his head against the college walls, whereupon the congregation would respond: “Amen.” Sometimes one would say: “I did not write out my sermon.” With equal fervor the audience would cry out: “Praise ye the Lord.” Working zealously, however, Bishop Payne committed the denomination to the policy of thorough education for the ministry, a position from which the African Methodist Episcopal Church has never departed, and to which it owes not a few of the advantages that it now enjoys in having so many intelligent men in its ministry.

While Bishop Payne as a churchman did not become altogether involved in the anti-slavery movement, so many distinguished men in the church did. John N. Marrs of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was more of an anti-slavery lecturer than a preacher. Thomas James of the same denomination was equally as effective as an anti-slavery lecturer. He was much readier to fight than to preach when he thought of the enormities of slavery. Another Zionite, Dempsey Kennedy, a pioneer preacher of remarkable skill in stirring up audiences, rendered as much service as an abolitionist as he did as a minister.

One of the best examples of this type is Charles Bennett Ray, born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, December 28, 1807. He was educated at the Wesleyan Academy of Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and later at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. After studying theology he became a Congregational minister. For twenty years he was the pastor of the Bethesda Church in New York City, where many learned to wait upon his ministry. He is better known to fame, however, by the work which he did outside of his chosen field in connection with the anti-slavery movement, the Underground Railroad, and The Colored American, which he creditably edited from 1839 to 1843.

Ray aided the cause of liberty by lending practical aid which men in high places often had neither the time nor the patience to give, using his home as a mecca for the meetings of such men as Lewis Tappan, Simeon S. Josselyn, Gerit Smith, the land philanthropist, and James Sturge, the celebrated English philanthropist, interested in the abolition of slavery. In coöperation with wealthy abolitionists he assisted many a slave to the light of freedom, especially through the aid of Henry Ward Beecher of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Ray found himself coöperating also with the group of radical free people of color meeting in Philadelphia and in other cities of the North from 1830 until the Civil War. When one reads of his participation in this work with James Forten, a business man, and Charles B. Purvis, another layman, he is inclined to forget that Charles B. Ray was a minister, as his name appears in the records of practically all of these conventions of the free people of color and his work stands out as an important factor contributing to the success with which these aggressive Negroes kept their case before the world and gradually hastened the dawn of their freedom. In all of his various employments, however, Ray did not lose interest in and did not necessarily neglect his mission to promote the moral uplift of his fellows. A contemporary, William Wells Brown, paying him a tribute as a terse, vigorous writer and an able and eloquent speaker, well informed upon all subjects of the day, says also that he was “blameless in his family relations, guided by the highest moral rectitude, a true friend of

THE outbreak of the Civil War was also an outbreak in the church. The versatile minister then proclaimed war and sometimes donned the uniform. One half of the nation had preached that God hath made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth; the other half insisted that the plan of the Creator was a caste system by which one element of the population should be made hewers of wood and drawers of water for the other. The ordeal of battle was then on, and it was believed that the exhibition of the greater force on one of the two sides would determine the will of God. Men of both sections fought for what they believed to be right. Sermons resounded with the ring of freedom, the Bible was quoted to strengthen the belief in a just war, and songs of a militant tone made the welkin ring with that enthusiasm with which the Christian boy was inspired to give his life as a sacrifice, fighting for freedom or defending his section from the invasion of the ruthless foe. God was here; God was there; in fact, he was, as the participants would have it, fighting the battles of all.

THIS favorable beginning, however, was not indicative of a straightforward attack on the tents of wickedness. Many Negroes who were trained for the ministry never entered thereupon because of the lure of politics during the days of Reconstruction. Some who had engaged in this Christian work found out that in spite of the most thorough training by pious men, they were not fitted for such a calling and abandoned it for the political arena. Others who were seemingly successful in the ministry divided their time between their profession and politics, either because of the exigencies of the situation or the desire to attain positions of prominence in keeping with the traditions of the white people of the South, who have emphasized unduly the status of the professional class.

There were during the Reconstruction period, moreover, so many other necessities with which the Negroes had to be supplied that the Negro preacher, often the only one in a community usually sufficiently well developed to lead the people, had to devote his time not only to church work but to every matter of concern to the race. In some respects, the Negroes after the war were not far removed from the conditions obtaining in the North before the war. Many of their former problems still confronted them. The chief difference was that after the war the Negroes had fighting ground on which to stand to wage a battle for those things which, having been begrudgingly granted, were being gradually taken away.

That the Negro preacher should continue a man of so many interests was but a natural consequence of the trend in the development of the race in this country. Up to this time the Negroes had established and maintained only one institution of their own. That was their church. When the time came for them to exercise other functions in society this one institution had to be overworked to supply the needs of others. Inasmuch as the church then became the center of so many activities the minister in charge often had to take the lead in shaping the policy of his people that they might advance in the right way. Ministers who abandoned their pulpits for the political world may be condemned as deserting their post of duty; but when one considers the call of their race in the situation in which it was and the valuable services some of them rendered, he cannot hastily conclude that the race thereby lost more than it gained. History should be studied sympathetically. The devotee to the faith should not denounce these men as recreant to Christianity and the student of politics must not dub them as interlopers in a forbidden field. Never before had a race been liberated under such circumstances. Never before had a group in such an undeveloped state been called upon to do so many things in such a short time. That the procedure of the race in this infinitely complex situation differed somewhat from that of others who had centuries to do what the Negroes were required to accomplish in a day, should be no cause of surprise.

In this respect, moreover, the Negroes did not differ widely from the whites. It is true that there has not been any period in the history of the whites when such a large percentage of the ministry freely participated in matters of the world, but the Negro minister found in the record of the whites precedents for all of his deviation from the customary course of the preacher of the Word. In their frontier condition the pioneering whites had often been reduced to the necessity of following the leadership of the versatile minister just as the Negroes were during the Reconstruction period. Among them the minister was sometimes the man of all work. He had a farm or business from which he obtained most of his means of subsistence; he of necessity often studied law and practiced in the local courts; he not infrequently aspired to office and, if successful, sometimes forgot his beginnings. And even within the memory of the living, examples are not wanting. Ex-Governor Atkinson of West Virginia was a minister in the Methodist Church and, like the Negro during these trying days, answered the call of his constituents. James A. Garfield, who attained the presidency of the United States, abandoned this exalted profession for the more interesting rôle of politics.

The salient facts of the careers of some of these ministers thus allured are more than interesting. Dr. William J. Simmons after being educated and engaged in the Baptist ministry for some time entered politics in Florida about 1874. Well received by his neighbors, he soon became county clerk and then county commissioner. He served as chairman of the county campaign committee and a member of the district congressional committee. In the campaign of Hayes and Tilden, Simmons was a conspicuous figure. He stumped the State for the Republican candidates with such success as materially to aid the cause in that he helped to raise the Republican majority of his county from 525 to 986 when the whole State gave Hayes a majority of only 147. Dr. Simmons later settled in Louisville, where he distinguished himself as a minister and as the founder of what is now known as the William J. Simmons University.

Dr. James Poindexter's career shows how difficult it was for the Negro ministers to avoid politics. Coming from Virginia, as a pioneer among those who sought better opportunities in the Northwest, he was at once a serious leader. He became a minister in the Baptist Church even before the Civil War and never actually sought an official position, hoping rather to maintain himself as a fearless speaker and writer in behalf of his oppressed people. Yet he too was to some extent attracted to politics in self-defense. He was the first man of color in Ohio nominated for the House of Delegates, but was defeated. We find him some years later serving as the foreman of a grand jury. He was appointed a trustee of the Ohio University at Athens but the Democratic Senate of the State would not confirm him. He was for four years a member of the City Council of Columbus, serving that body as vice-president. Later he was appointed to fill a vacancy on the School Board of Columbus, was elected to the position at the expiration of the term, and reëlected against great odds over a Democratic opponent in 1887.

Poindexter's position in this case, like that of so many others, may be stated in his own words. Addressing an audience on the “Pulpit and Politics,” he said: “Nor can a preacher more than any other citizen plead his religious work or the sacredness of that work as an exemption from duty. Going to the Bible to learn the relation of the pulpit to politics, and accepting the prophets, Christ, and apostles, and the pulpit of their times, and their precepts and examples as the guide of the pulpit to-day, I think that their conclusion will be that wherever there is a sin to be rebuked, no matter by whom committed, and ill to be averted or good to be achieved by our country or mankind, there is a place for the pulpit to make itself felt and heard. The truth is, all the help the preachers and all other good and worthy citizens can give by taking hold of politics is needed in order to keep the government out of bad hands and secure the ends for which governments are formed.”

Dr. J. T. White, another preacher of the Reconstruction period, attained much distinction in this field. Fortunate in having acquired a fundamental education in Indianapolis prior to the war, he easily made an impression at the Consolidated Baptist Convention in St. Louis in 1865 when he received a call to a small Baptist Church of Helena, Arkansas. Among these communicants he toiled successfully without concern as to other affairs until 1868, when the reconstruction of the State was begun. He was induced to present himself as a candidate for delegate to the constitutional convention and was elected. He figured conspicuously in framing the constitution and canvassed the State to secure its ratification. He then became a part of the restored State government, serving his fellow citizens as a member of the House of Delegates, to which he was twice re-elected. He was chosen to serve one term in the State Senate, after which he was appointed by the Governor, Commissioner of Public Works and Internal Improvements. During this same period, however, he was doing his best work in building and edifying churches at Helena and Little Rock, and extending Baptist influence throughout the State and nation.

G. W. Gayles, a Mississippian of this type, acquired before his emancipation enough education to read intelligently. Having an inclination to study the Bible, he aspired to the ministry, for which he was set apart by a council of reputable Baptist ministers of Greenville in 1867. Going to Bolivar county to find a more inviting field, he became the pastor of the Kindling Altar Church in which he made an honorable record. He soon became involved in public affairs, however, as is evidenced by his appointment as member of the Board of Police for a district in Bolivar County by Governor A. Ames. The following year he was appointed Justice of the Peace in that county by Governor J. L. Alcorn, but later in that same mouth he was made a supervisor of another district in that county. He was then elected a member of the Mississippi Legislature, serving a term of two years in the lower house and then as State Senator from the 28th district, beginning 1877 and continuing into the eighties, when there had been no other Negro in that body since 1875.

In spite of his political activities, however, Gayles did not abandon religious work. Beginning in 1872, he served for many years as missionary for the counties of Bolivar and Sunflower and then in that capacity for Coahoma. Appreciating his worth, the Baptist State Missionary

Jesse Freeman Boulden was forced into politics against his will. In Philadelphia he acquired an elementary education. He later embraced religion in Maryland, and in 1853 connected himself with the Union Baptist Church in Philadelphia. He then became pastor of the Zion Baptist Church in Chicago, where he was succeeded by Richard DeBaptiste as pastor of the combined Olivet Baptist Church in 1863. As the war was then turning out favorable to the Union forces, Boulden called together at Brooklyn, Illinois, in 1864, a group of Illinois Baptist churches known as the Wood River Association to consider the importance of following the army and looking after the interests of the denomination in the South. This work then engaged the attention of Mr. Boulden to the extent that he gave up his church in 1865 and settled at Natchez, Mississippi. This was in many respects the turning point of his career. He immediately plunged into political matters as a leader to the manner born. He presented to Congress the first petition of that State praying that Negroes be granted the right of franchise. Boulden held the first emancipation celebration in 1866, and began to lecture to Negroes on the duty of the hour. Thus interested, he was made a factor in the organization of the Republican party in the north-eastern part of the State. He made the first Republican speech in the court house at Columbus and was a member of the first Mississippi Republican State Convention in 1867.

In all of this, however, he was not seeking personal gain; for brought out against his will as a candidate for the lower house of the legislature, he once thought of declining, but finally yielded, thinking that he might be able to do some good. In this position he took the lead in piloting through the legislature the election of Hiram Revells as United States Senator, and, after helping B. K. Bruce to become Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate, used his influence to make him also a member of the upper national body. He, like many others of his time, however, never deserted the ministry altogether for politics. After serving various churches and editing The Baptist Reflector of Columbus, Mississippi, he rendered his most valuable service as general agent of the American Baptist Home Mission Society for the State of New York.

P. H. A. Braxton, pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in Baltimore, and the Rev. D. F. Rivers, once a member of the Tennessee Legislature, seemed to have had their day in politics and then entered upon the ministry in contradistinction to most men of their time. Leaving the farm on which he was born a slave in Virginia, Braxton went into the stave business. Entering politics in King William county soon thereafter, however, he became constable in 1872, acquitting himself with honor. In the meantime he studied law with some degree of success. He then went to Washington, D. C., where he received an appointment in the custom house service in which he was converted in 1875. It seems that he lost the desire for politics thereafter. He was commissioned to preach in 1875, and appointed general agent of the consolidated American Baptist Missionary Convention in 1878. He took charge of the Calvary Baptist Church in Baltimore in 1879 and there made a record for himself and his denomination as a forceful preacher, successful organizer, and radical reformer. Rev. Mr. Rivers, after toiling in the West, came to Washington where he is still an active pastor.

Allen Allensworth prepared for the ministry at the Ely Normal School and at Roger Williams University. He rose rapidly in the denomination, serving the Kentucky Baptists as their financial agent, the pastor of churches at Elizabethtown, Franklin, Louisville, Bowling Green, and Cincinnati, and as a missionary in the employ of the American Baptist Publication Society. During these years, however, he was equally active as a leader in politics. The Republicans of Kentucky made much use of him as a campaigner, as he was a speaker of well-known power. By this party he was chosen to serve as an elector for the State-at-large on the Garfield-Arthur ticket in 1880 and was sent as delegate from that State to the National Republican Convention which met in Chicago in 1884. No one knows how far his political activity would have gone, had he not entered the army as chaplain before the Negro political organization in the South had collapsed.

Christopher H. Payne, who with the possible exception of Mordecai W. Johnson, has been the most intelligent preacher of color to toil in West Virginia, shows in his career how the political world finally absorbed some Negro ministers altogether. He began as a teacher In West Virginia, where by dint of energy he mastered the fundamentals of education. He then became converted and on realizing a call to the ministry, entered the Richmond Institute where he distinguished himself as a promising scholar. After serving the American Baptist Publication Society as a Sunday school missionary and as pastor of churches in Virginia and West Virginia, he became interested in politics in which he participated not only as a speaker but as an editor. He spent some time reading law, secured admission to the bar, and practiced in the local courts. In the course of time, he became more widely known as a figure in politics than as a churchman, although he was at the same time serving as pastor of some church and presiding over Baptist Associations and for years the Baptist State Convention of West Virginia. In 1896, he was elected a Member of the West Virginia Legislature, the first Negro to be so

Bishop W. B. Derrick of the African Methodist Episcopal Church also had a political career. From a brief career on the high seas he enlisted in the United States Navy during the Civil War and upon being converted entered the ministry of the African Methodist Church, serving with distinction in the Virginia Conference. Having by the end of the seventies attained this position of influence, he was induced to take an active part in the politics of that State at the time when one of the local parties desired to readjust the State debt. He allied himself with the “Funders,” the party in favor of paying the debt as it was contracted, since he believed that his attitude was in harmony with the principles of the National Republican Party. Thinking that his people were about to be made tools in the hands of ambitious and unscrupulous men, Dr. Derrick fearlessly denounced the “Readjusters” as a clique seeking to repudiate the payment of an honest debt. As this contest developed into a vindictive political battle engendering much local strife out of which the “Readjusters” emerged victors, Dr. Derrick, deeming it best to leave Virginia, resigned his charge and spent some time visiting his relatives in the West Indies. He returned to this country to resume his ministry in which he so rapidly developed that he became a popular bishop of his church.

Bishop H. M. Turner, one of the outstanding men of the Negro race, had his day also in politics. He equipped himself for the ministry by private instruction obtained under adverse circumstances, joined the Methodist Church in 1848, and transferred to the African Methodists in 1867, rising rapidly in this last-mentioned connection from the position of an itinerant preacher in St. Louis to an eldership in Washington, and a chaplaincy in the United States Army. During these years, however, he was most active in politics. In 1867 he was appointed by the National Republican Committee to superintend the organization of the Negroes in Georgia. In this capacity he stumped the State and wrote many articles which he spread broadcast to direct his people in his way. That year he was elected a member of the State Constitutional Convention. He was next chosen a member of the legislature the following year and re-elected in 1870, when he was expelled on account of his color. President Grant appointed him postmaster of Macon in 1869; but he had to resign on account of persecution. He was afterward appointed Coast Inspector of Customs and United States Government Detective, but after holding the position a few years he resigned it to meet the demands of the church whose cause, in spite of his political activities, he had never abandoned, and whose good judgment made him the influential bishop of the denomination.

Speaking of his career himself, he said on an occasion: “And my labors have not stopped in the religious sphere, but it is well known to every one that I have done more work in the political field than any five men in the State, if you will take out Colonel Bryant. I first organized the Republican party in this State, and have worked for its maintenance and perpetuity as no other man in the State has. I have put more men in the field, made more speeches, organized more union leagues, political associations, clubs, and have written more campaign documents, that received larger circulation, than any other man in the State. Why, one campaign document I wrote alone was so acceptable that it took four million copies to satisfy the public. And as you are well aware, these labors have not been performed amid sunshine and prosperity. I have been the constant target of Democratic abuse and venom, and white Republican jealousy. The newspapers have teemed with all kind of slander, accusing me of every crime in the catalogue of villainy; I have been arrested and tried on some of the wildest charges and most groundless accusations ever distilled from the laboratory of hell. Witnesses have been paid as high as four thousand dollars to swear me into the penitentiary; white preachers have sworn that I tried to get up insurrections, etc., a crime punishable with death; and all such deviltry has been resorted to for the purpose of breaking me down, and with all they have not hurt a hair of my head, nor even bothered my brain longer than they were going through the farce of adjudication. . . . I invariably let them say their say and do their do; while they were studying against me, I was studying for the interest of the church, and working for the success of my party.”

Richard Harvey Cain, converted in 1841 and installed as a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, saw himself rising to a position of usefulness after his training at Wilberforce, followed by his pastoral work in the New York and South Carolina Conferences. Although he had unusually extended his field of labor by successful efforts at Summerville, Lincolnville, Georgetown, Marion, and Sumter, he had too much energy to be confined altogether to the church. Interesting himself in whatever touched the life of his people, he edited a Republican newspaper in 1868. He secured his election as a member of the Reconstruction constitutional convention in South Carolina and played an important role in rebuilding the government of that State along liberal lines. He served two years as State Senator from the Charleston District. In 1879 he was given a much more honorable recognition in being elected a member of the Forty-third Congress. He was again thus honored in being elected to the Forty-fifth Congress in 1881 and “served with distinction and marked ability,” making most eloquent speeches in the advocacy of civil rights for the Negro.

His close connection with the church, however, was still maintained, for he was elected bishop in 1880 and assigned to the Louisiana and Texas district. Speaking of him as a man remarkable for uniting these two fields, Bishop Derrick said: “He surely could be considered a captain of the hosts, one of the kindliest and pleasantest of Christian statesmen and a man of clear good judgment blended with a strong resolution and firmness, which made him the master of many difficult situations in the active and political career which marked his statesmanship with brilliant success.

Bishop B. W. Arnett, one of the most popular men who have hitherto risen in the African Methodist Church, served his people also in these two ways. When political opportunities were first offered the Negroes in the South he had already served as a teacher and had passed through the gradations of the ministry to a position of influence in his denomination in Ohio. The need was too urgent and the call too imperative for him not to participate in the affairs of his State and nation. Once in politics, he easily became a commanding figure even in Ohio, where because of the small black population a Negro could not secure the following easily obtained at that time in the Southern States. In 1885 he was elected

Bishop James W. Hood, of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, in his day one of the most influential men of color in the United States, found himself also in the political world. He began as a preacher in Nova Scotia in 1860, served later at Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then went to North Carolina, where his successful work exalted him to the bishopric in 1872. His very going to North Carolina, however, had a political setting. He went to Newbern as a missionary under General Butler's invitation to the churches to send missionaries, even while the place was under the fire of the Confederate forces. When the war in that area was cleared up and Reconstruction was undertaken Bishop Hood was among the first to participate therein. He was elected president of the convention of Negroes assembled at Raleigh in October, 1865, one of the first, if not the first, political convocation of this sort ever assembled in the South. On this occasion he so fearlessly advocated equal rights for the Negro that he was warned by the people around that his life would be in danger, if he did not desist therefrom In 1867 he was elected as delegate to the constitutional convention of North Carolina, in which he took such an active part in framing the fundamental law, incorporating into it such liberal provisions for homesteads and public schools that it was spoken of by the reactionaries as Hood's constitution until it was amended in 1875. He served as a magistrate under the provisional government in North Carolina and later became a deputy Collector of Internal Revenue for the United States.

In 1868 he was appointed an agent of the State Board of Education and Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction, receiving a salary of $1,500 a year; but he did not abandon his church work, having built up a large congregation at Charlotte during the three years he served in these positions. He traveled also in the interest of the Freedmen's Bureau in the capacity of an Assistant Superintendent. Thus in a position to help his people, Bishop Hood had in 1870 as many as 49,000 Negro children in school. He had established for Negroes a department for the deaf, dumb, and blind and had about sixty inmates under care and instruction at the expense of the State. He hoped to establish a State university, but the undoing of Reconstruction prevented him from reaching that end. He was named in 1872 by the Republican caucus as their candidate for Secretary of State, but he declined the honor. He served that year as delegate at large to the National Republican Convention, which nominated Grant the second time. In 1876 he was chosen temporary chairman of the Republican State Convention, which he served with much satisfaction.

This account of the Negro in politics, however, does not establish the fact that either the majority or even the best prepared of the Negro ministry devoted all of their time to politics. There were many striking examples to the contrary. Bishop Daniel Payne lived long after the Civil War to promote education and religion, and when he died was regarded by many as the most useful man of the race. Bishop Lee, as President of Wilberforce University and a functionary of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, rendered his race constructive service. Dr. Alexander Crummell took no active part in politics, although he fearlessly spoke out for the political and civil rights of his race. Dr. J. Sella Martin, prominent in the ministry before and after the Civil War, attained the distinction of one of the most eloquent men of his race without permitting politics to consume much of his time. Bishop Grant, one of the most useful men of his denomination, did not find it necessary to seek honors beyond the limits of the church. John Jasper, known to fame as the Baptist preacher of the Sun-Moving theory, established for himself throughout Virginia and adjacent States a reputation for piety and sincerity, which, without political influence, made him a power in the country.

Among these consecrated churchmen, moreover, none can be considered a better example than Bishop B. T. Tanner, a well-educated man, who became distinguished in the services of his church years before the emancipation. His addresses exhibited learning and mature thought and the several works which he published entitled him to the distinction of being one of the most scholarly Negroes of his time. Among these works may be mentioned his Apology for African Methodism, The Negro's Origin, An Outline of Our History and Government; the Negro, African and American. In 1884 he was made editor of the African Biblical Review, which he so popularized that he was soon chosen bishop by his denomination.

Bishop L. H. Holsey of the C. M. E. Church distinguished himself by a career equally as honorable. After rendering faithful service as a minister in the church he was elevated to the episcopacy at a time when the church needed the guidance of a master hand. The manner in which he addressed himself to his task and the good results which he obtained soon convinced his communicants that the selection was not a mistake. That during his day the Colored Methodists did

Deserving of honorable mention in this connection are many distinguished Negroes who impressed the world as preachers of power. They not only built imposing edifices and pastored large congregations, but went from place to place in the State and country impressing the world with the power of God unto salvation. So generally did they ingratiate themselves into the favor of the public that they passed among the people as seers and prophets of a former period. Among these should be mentioned Dr. W. Bishop Johnson and Dr. C. M. Tanner of the District of Columbia; Dr. Harvey Johnson of Baltimore; E. K. Love and W. J. White of Georgia; Daniel Stratton, Nelson Barnett, and R. J. Perkins of West Virginia; and J. J. Worlds and L. W. Boone of North Carolina. There were also James Holmes, for years the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia; Dr. Richard Wells, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the same city; Anthony Binga, a churchman of scholarly bearing, who wrote important dissertations of a theological nature while pastoring the leading Baptist Church in Manchester, Virginia; and Dr. William H. Stokes, a worker of much influence in Richmond, still speaking fearlessly in behalf of his people.

Identified with this serious group was Richard DeBaptiste, who migrated with his free parents of color from Fredericksburg, Virginia, to the Northwest after the restrictions placed upon the Negroes of this class in Virginia became intolerable. His first important work was that of teaching a public school for colored youth in the Springfield township at Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, where he later organized and pastored a Baptist Church from 1860 to 1863. He then became pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, a charge which he held until 1882. Serving in this capacity, he purchased two building sites at a cost of $16,000 and built two brick church edifices costing respectively $15,000 and $18,000.

His work as a minister, however, was in no sense local. He was elected corresponding secretary of the Wood River Association in 1864, was a prominent figure and officer in the Northwestern and Southern Baptist Convention organized in 1865, and was chosen president of the American Baptist Missionary Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, serving it consecutively for four years. He was thereafter elected president at intervals and remained a commanding figure in the convention because of his power and influence in the church. Manifesting further interest in the work of the denomination, he contributed to the church literature through the Chicago Conservator, the Western Herald, and the National Monitor. In fact, in his day he was not only the outstanding minister of his denomination in the West, but one of the most influential men of his race.

One of the most prominent ministers of the Reconstruction period who were not deterred from their course by politics was Rufus L. Perry. Born a slave in Nashville, Tennessee, where because of the liberal attitude of the whites toward the Negroes, he, in spite of his condition, was permitted to attend a free school for Negroes, Perry had, even before the Civil War, laid a foundation upon which he well built thereafter. He escaped from slavery in 1852 and entered upon the study of theology at the Kalamazoo (Michigan) Seminary, graduating with the class of 1861, when he was ordained as pastor of the Baptist Church at Ann Arbor, Michigan. He later served as a pastor at St. Catherine's, Ontario, and at Buffalo and Brooklyn, New York. He had then convinced the world that he was “very logical, a clear reasoner, close and active debater, deep thinker, and excellent writer,” “a man of splendid natural abilities,” who “goes at once to the bottom of any subject that he undertakes.”

Upon the dawn of freedom he entered upon the larger duties in the service of the Negroes, doing at first missionary and educational work among the freedmen, endeavoring to evangelize and elevate

Having given much attention to the study of ethnology and the classics, he doubtless impressed the world most by writing a book entitled The Cushites; or the Children of Ham as seen by the Ancient Historians and Poets. In this work he showed remarkable ability for research and extensive knowledge of the social sciences. He undertook to refute the statement that the Ethiopians and the Egyptians were not black persons, endeavored to disabuse the public mind of the impropriety of a contemptuous attitude to the Negroes because of their bondage, inasmuch as all races have at times been enslaved, and eloquently produced historical facts to convince thinking men as to the important achievements of the Negroes in their more fortunate ages in the past. He certainly made the impression of being one of the ablest men in the United States, and will long be remembered as a scholar making for the race a defense which many of his contemporaries were not prepared to appreciate.

The ministry was sufficiently attractive also to Dr. George W. Lee, who began his career in North Carolina. After having distinguished himself by efficient service in that State, he was, in 1885, called to the pastorate of the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church to succeed the Rev. J. H. Brooks, its founder, who passed away the previous year. Dr. Lee was noted especially for three significant elements of character. He was a promoter of African missions, was always disposed to help the under-man in a struggle, and made himself a patron of the youth aspiring to leadership. His pastorate was characterized by important achievements bearing on the progress of not only his congregation but that of his denomination. Noted for his originality and ability to master a situation, he soon attracted a large following and increased the membership of his church almost to 4,000. He easily became a man of national reputation, and in his travels abroad so impressed the people wherever he went that he passed as an international character.

With the possible exception of Dr. C. A. Tindley, the talented Methodist minister of Philadelphia, probably the greatest preacher of power developed during the last generation has been Dr. C. T. Walker. Coming under the influence of Christian missionaries and of the Atlanta Baptist College, he had his beginnings determined in an atmosphere of religious education. For forty years, excepting five years when he had charge of the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, Now York City, he was pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia. His church in Augusta was attended not only by thousands of his own race, but by hundreds of winter tourists, who heard him with unusual satisfaction. Among these were former President Taft, John D. Rockefeller, Gen. Rush C. Hawkins, Dr. David Gregg and Lyman B. Goff. With the support of such a large number this church undertook to supply the needs of the community, developing into an institutional enterprise with all of the activities of a social welfare agency. This expansion necessitated a new building, which he erected at a cost of $185,000.

Dr. Walker was interested in all things promoting the uplift of the race. He was the founder of the now spacious 135th Street Branch, Young Men's Christian Association, New York City, and figured largely in the establishment of a similar branch for his people in Augusta, Georgia. He was one of the prominent figures of the National Baptist Convention of the United States, being vice-president of the organization when he died, as well as vice-president of the Georgia Baptist State Convention and moderator of the Walker Association. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Holy Land and was the author of a number of books of travel and also of sermons. His main work at home and abroad, however, was that of an evangelist whose fame as such so rapidly extended that he was one of the most popular speakers in the country, attracting larger crowds than any other Negro of his time.

IT is clear from the account set forth above that the Negro church as such had some difficulty in finding itself. There was still a question as to what its functions and ideals should be, and this very question all but divided the church into conservative and progressive groups. The conservative element in control became so dogmatic in its treatment of the rising progressive minority that the institution for a number of years lost ground among the talented tenth. For this reason the ministry once became decidedly uninviting to young men. Young people so rapidly lost interest in the church that the Sunday sermon denouncing the waywardness of the wicked generation was generally expected; and, if a special discourse of this vitriolic nature did not periodically follow, pastors availed themselves of the opportunity to digress from the discussion of the hardships of slavery, hell, and the grave to express their deep regret that the intellectual youth were disinclined to walk in the footsteps of their fathers. Such sermons frightened some into repentance, but drove as many away from contact with the Christian element of the community.

The waywardness of the youth, however, was not so much a wickedness as it was a divergence in the Negro social mind. The ex-slaves had remained conservative. The old-time religion was good enough for them. They rejoiced to be able to sing in freedom the songs of their fathers, and deemed it a privilege to testify in “their experience or class meetings” and to offer at their Sunday services long drawn out invocations which afforded them the once forbidden exercise of the outpouring of a pent-up soul. Preachers who came down from that well-fought age appreciated, of course, the unique position which they then occupied. For all a new world had been created, so to speak, and what they needed then was only to enjoy the new boon vouchsafed to the lowly. The Negroes should thank God for their freedom, and the only way to express that gratitude was through vociferous praise and stentorian thanksgiving within the courts of the Lord. God had brought the Negro up out of Egypt through Sodom and Gomorrah, and to show his gratitude the chief concern of the Negro should then be “to be ready to walk into Jerusalem just like John.”

The Negroes then under the instruction of well-enlightened missionaries from the North could not long remain in this backward state. Although not taught radical doctrines but, on the contrary, influenced by conservative religious teachers, the educational process itself had to work some changes in the young Negro's point of view, inasmuch as he was taught not what to think but how to think. The young Negroes, therefore, had not attended school very long or moved very much among persons mentally developed before they found themselves far removed from the members of their race less favorably circumstanced. They developed an inquiring disposition which leveled shafts at the strongholds of churchmen whose chief protection lay in their unfortunate plight of being embalmed in their ignorance along with a majority constituency hopelessly lost to the “eternal truths” coming into the mind of the Negro youth by “natural light.”

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, therefore, the conservative and progressive elements in the church unconsciously drifted far apart. In the course of time it was no longer a struggle between the old and young. The difference in age ceased to be the line of cleavage. It was rather a difference of ideas. These groups were widely differing in their interpretation of religion, in their ideas as to the importance of the church in the life of the community, in their attitudes as to the relation of the church to the individual, and in their standards of public conduct. On the whole, there was an effort to stand together; but in spite of themselves the line of cleavage had to be recognized and dealt with as a fact. As poverty is jealous of opulence, so is ignorance jealous of intelligence; and in this case the jealousy all but developed into caste hate.

The progressive element commonly dubbed by the conservatives as the educated Negroes could not accept the crude notions of Biblical interpretation nor the grotesque vision of the hereafter as portrayed by the illiterate ministers of the church. This developed mind found itself unwillingly at war with such extravagant claims and seeking a hearing for a new idea. Religion to the progressives became a Christian experience rather than the wild notions of revelation, which among some of the uninformed too often bordered on superstition and voodooism of the middle age, after the restraint of slavery had been removed and the Negroes as groups exercising religious freedom could indulge their fancy at will.

The educated Negro, moreover, no longer thought of religion as the panacea for all the ills of the race. Along with religion he would insist that education should go as its handmaiden, inasmuch as there can be little revelation of God where there is arrested mental development. The very example of Christ himself, as understood by the progressive Negro, furnished no evidence as to the virtue of unrestrained emotion resulting from a lack of understanding and from an unwillingness to search the Scriptures for the real revelation of God.

Being weak on the intellectual side, the conservative Negro churchman could not fail to decry the educated communicants as a growing menace to the church. The church militant was ordered forward to attack the strongholds of this unbelief lest the institution might be shaken from its very foundation. The toleration of such views might bring upon this generation the wrath of God, who would visit the race with condign affliction. The educated class had information, not judgment; and the principles of religion, moreover, must be accepted as they are without question. The effort here was to crush the scion because it was producing a more vigorous species than the root from which it sprang, to destroy life because in the new generation it meant living too abundantly.

The churchmen of the conservative order observed with regret, moreover, that the talented Negro had a differing conception as to the relation of the church to the individual. Among the conservatives, the church, the only institution in which they could participate in the days of slavery, engaged their undivided attention with the exception of politics in self-defense during the Reconstruction period. The conservatives believed that the individual should sacrifice all for the church. On Sunday, they would come from afar to swell the chorus of the faithful, and there they would remain during the day, leaving their net earnings in the hands of the management, given at the cost of a sacrifice placed on a common altar. The educated Negro, on the other hand, thought of the church as existing for the good of the individual. It was to him a means for making the bad good, and if the institution were defective it might be so reshaped and reorganized as to serve the useful purposes of man.

The church, moreover, as the progressive Negro saw it, was not necessarily Christlike unless the persons composing it were of such character themselves. As there were too often found here and there impostors serving as important functionaries in churches in which they masqueraded as Christians, the educated Negro insisted upon a new interpretation of Christian doctrine, boldly asserting new principles as to the relation of man to his fellowman and man to God. Religion, the progressive element insisted, is a social virtue not an individual boon. Man cannot by his professed periodical baring of his soul to God set himself aright when his conduct has not been in conformity with the teachings of Jesus. Since an individual is what he does, an institution composed of individuals, too often shamed with ignorance and vice, could not be the ideal Christian organization to which Christ looked as his representative following here on earth.

The Negro in freedom, moreover, when given an opportunity for mental development, gradually became assimilated to the white man's standard of conduct. The educated Negro began to see little harm in dancing and card playing when representative white churches abrogated such prohibitions or suffered them to fall into desuetude. Taunted as to the evil desire for the ways of the world, the talented man usually retorted that while his conduct was questioned by his own people it was in keeping with the ethics of the most enlightened of the land, whereas the conservatives tended to follow the policy of practicing almost any sort of vice clandestinely and to masquerade as Christians until exposed.

This argument was of little worth; for many of the so-called vices of the Negro members of the church could be reduced largely to unconfirmed reports and indulgences of the imagination of persons having foul minds. While the writer offers no brief for the religious workers of long ago, he must insist that we have no evidence to justify the sweeping generalization that the Negro Christians of the conservative order were, as a rule, morally corrupt or that they generally harbored unclean persons in their group. Their record rather shows a most healthy attitude toward maintaining a high standard of morality. The adulterer, the gambler, the thief, and the like, were usually summarily expelled from the church as undesirables, who should not sit in the congregation of the righteous. In fact, had it not been for the hold of Christianity on these freedmen, their standards of morality would have been so much lower; for they saw for emulation little of the righteous in the white people with whom they came into contact when these generally imposed upon the blacks by lying and stealing and openly sought Negro women with whom the flower of southern families lived in open adultery. The conservatives stood for the right, although they were often too narrow to overlook the so-called vices which supplied to those of talent the harmless pleasures of this world.

The progressive element seriously objected to church management. Negro ministers and the governing bodies of the churches often manifested more zeal than tact in the conduct of church affairs. They too frequently built rather costly edifices, paid their pastors disproportionately large salaries, and lavished unduly upon them and their families gifts which the poor of their congregations could ill afford. The Negroes wanted a well-groomed leader in a heaven on earth to lead them to the heaven beyond. The management then incurred debts of such magnitude that the church too often developed into a money raising machine dominated from without by white speculators who profited by this folly. The progressive element militantly arrayed itself against this outlay made at the expense of the moral and religious life of the community. In their zeal they too often denounced the conservatives in control as tricksters and grafters, when, as a matter of fact, the management lost more by inefficient administration than it acquired by so-called corruption.

The progressive Negroes boldly advocated a

The general result was that in many communities a much larger number of intelligent people were driven from the church or rendered inefficient therein than were saved to it. There was little chance for coöperation so long as the conservatives were unyielding; and the progressives, unable to treat the conservatives diplomatically, failed to put aside complaint to begin with the masses where they were that they might carry them where they should be. Some of the progressive element left their names on the church books only to forfeit membership by non-attendance or the failure to pay required dues. Others saw themselves excluded for violation of the sacred rules of the congregation proscribing participation in the worldly joys. A few who felt compunction of conscience on realizing how disgraceful in the eyes of the community it seemed to put one's hand to the plow and then turn back, had their backsliding healed and returned to the fold.

Those who left the conservative churches were often received by the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Catholics, who, having a more flexible attitude toward the pleasures of the world, offered asylum to the outcasts driven from the former sanctuaries. This separation included not only laymen but in some cases ministers, who, on connecting themselves with some other denominations, served their people in churches differing widely from those which were so handicapped by unprogressive elements that they had no hope to toil upward therein. The large majority of the members of these smaller denominations were once members of Baptist or Methodist churches or were the children of persons who were once thus connected.

It was not necessary, however, for a large number of Baptists thus to be lost to that denomination. Unlike the Methodists, who are restrained by episcopal government, the Baptists needed only to exercise the privileges of democracy guaranteed in that church. A dissatisfied group of the “upper crust” in a Baptist Church could at any time organize another Baptist Church without any restraint except that of the fear of the failure of the enterprise from the economic point of view. Schismatic churches or exclusively aristocratic congregations, therefore, followed in large cities where a sufficient number of the malcontents in the various denominations could unite for this common purpose.

This schismatic movement was followed by both good and bad results. The separation of the progressive and the conservative elements in the church made it impossible for the unprogressive to learn by example from those with whom they came into contact. Each remained happier in the new state so long as the results of this divergence were not strikingly apparent. The conservatives could better remain what they were and the progressives could more easily become what they wanted to be. The cessation of hostilities, however, did not always follow; for both churches representing different points of view made their appeals to the same community, endeavoring to secure financial and moral support. In small communities what was done for the one could not be done for the other for the reason that the community had so much and no more to spare. The success or failure of the one or the other, therefore, too often meant grudge or ill will.

This contest between the progressive and conservative, however, has been more than local. There have arisen serious situations, some of which have been handled so diplomatically as to avoid outbreaks in the ranks, and others which have led to radical changes. For example, the progressive Negro in the Methodist Episcopal Church for a number of years bore it grievously that, although the members of the race constituted an important element in this denomination, they were not allowed freely to participate in its management. The objective was to make a Negro one of the regular bishops, but conservative whites insisted that the time had not come for such a radical step.

During this long struggle in the Methodist Church the progressive group became very impatient. It was in favor of separation from the white connection either to establish an independent church or to join one of the African Methodist churches already in the making. The conservative element frowned down upon any such proposal as a suicidal scheme, believing that in coöperating with the whites the Negroes had much more to gain than to lose. The advocacy of continued union with the whites under the prevailing circumstances, however, was dubbed by the progressive Negroes a manifestation of the spirit of servility resulting from a slavish attachment to their former masters. The counsel of the conservative prevailed, however, and although the Negro membership does not enjoy exactly the same privileges as the white, it has steadily gained ground.

The best example of a situation which could not be thus handled is that of the repudiation of the white Baptists by the progressive Negro element of this church. The white Baptists, of course, had no actual control of the Negro communicants, but had some very strong moral claims on them. White missionaries of this denomination had distributed literature, organized churches, constructed edifices, and established schools among Negroes; and the boards supporting the missionaries had supplied some of the funds by which most of these institutions were maintained. To say anything derogatory to the policies of the management directing this beneficent work, therefore, seemed to the conservative Negroes all but blasphemous.

The progressive Baptist element, however, had a different attitude. Thousands of Negro teachers and preachers whom these Baptist schools had trained had entered upon their life's work with the hope that they would figure conspicuously in the life of their people. When they faced the stern realities of the situation they too often found their way was blocked. White men, to be sure, did not aspire to the pastorate of Negro churches; but they undertook to dictate the policy of associations and conventions to retain their hold on the Negro Baptists. The conflict came when Negroes

The Negroes had a just cause for complaint. If under the leadership of the white Baptists their way to promotion would be blocked and their literary aspirations crushed, what hope was there for the race to rise and of what benefit would education be to the Negro, if it did not equip him to do for himself what the white man at first had to do for him? How could the motives of the white Baptists be lofty, moreover, if they did not believe that Negroes should rise in the church and school? To this the whites replied that they looked forward with the most pleasant anticipation to the day when the Negroes would be prepared to enjoy the good things for which they clamored, but that the time for the Negroes to dispense with the leadership of the whites had not then come. Many years of education and social uplift were still necessary before the Negroes could successfully set out to do for themselves.

This argument had little weight with the progressive Negroes and they were not wanting in logical speakers to place their case before the world. There was that courageous leader, Dr. Harvey Johnson, of Baltimore, who belabored his former friends as enemies of the race. Equally effective, too, was the eloquent Dr. Walter H. Brooks of Washington, who fearlessly took up the cudgel and dealt the white Baptists many a blow from which they never recovered. With the National Baptist Convention emerging as a common concern of Negroes under the organizing hand of Dr. E. C. Morris, and the National Baptist Publishing House extending the circulation of elementary literature throughout the country under the direction of the efficient Dr. R. H. Boyd, this self-assertion of the Negro Baptists became a factor to be reckoned with.

All problems, however, were not immediately solved. The progressive Negroes had the right spirit, but did not every time have adequate understanding. They had had no experience in editing literature and practically none in raising sums of money necessary for the maintenance of educational establishments and missionary enterprise. The majority of the Negro Baptist ministry trained in the schools of the American Baptist Home Mission Society at first adhered to this organization and persisted in using the Sunday school literature of the American Baptist Publication Society, deriding the publication efforts of the Negro Baptists as the greatest travesty on Biblical literature. This criticism was most uncharitable, but nevertheless effective, for the reason that some who at first wished the movement well made the mistake of despising the day of small things.

The struggle was most intense in the Southeast. The influence of Shaw University in North Carolina and Virginia Union University in Richmond had given the white Baptists an all but firm hold on the Negroes in these and adjacent States. The presidents of these institutions and the white agents of the denomination attended the Negro associations and conventions, hoping to dictate their policies; but this interference only widened the breach. Under the leadership of that forceful orator and successful leader, Gregory W. Hayes, a large number at first and finally a majority of the Baptists of Virginia disclaimed connection with these white friends and concentrated their efforts on supporting the Virginia Theological Seminary and College through the Baptist State Convention of that commonwealth. The leading Baptists of North Carolina, however, still adhered in large numbers to the American Baptist Home Mission Society, coöperating therewith through the local associations, their State conventions, and the conservative national body known as the Lott Cary Convention, which had also many adherents in Virginia and scattered followers throughout adjacent States. In other parts, the factions about equally divided, except in the southwestern section of the country, where the Negroes have tended to break away from the white Baptists.

As to which faction was right, history alone will tell. Even at the present, however, one can see a decided advantage in the independent Negro movement. Every one will admit that the Negro must eventually rely solely upon himself, and that not until he emerges from a state of dependency can he hope to secure the recognition of the other groups. The white man is rapidly tiring of carrying the so-called burdens of the Negro. The Negro home, church, and school must, as fast as possible, become sufficient unto themselves. The sooner they attain this stage in their development, the better will it be for the race. The Negro institutions which during the turbulent period have, in separating from the whites, learned to supply their own needs, have made a step far in advance of those dependent on the whites. In this day, when the northern philanthropists are either withholding their donations to Negro schools or restricting them to Hampton and Tuskegee, it is difficult for some of these establishments to eke out a subsistence, while the independent Negro schools, having had years of experience in developing a following, find their prospects growing brighter from year to year. The National Training School for Girls, founded and successfully directed by the noted Nannie H. Burroughs, obtains practically all of its funds from Negroes. The Virginia Theological Seminary and College, under the direction of the efficient Dr. R. C. Woods, depends for its support altogether upon Negroes, who contribute to it annually about $60,000.00. There is not in this country a Negro institution dominated by whites that can raise half of this sum in this way. A few years ago when Wilberforce University was heavily indebted and it seemed that it needed some one to rescue it, the State of Ohio proposed to buy the church portion of the institution; but the trustees, with the spirit of the progressive Negro, emphatically replied that the whole State of Ohio did not have enough money to buy Wilberforce. Rallying under the leadership of Bishop Joshua H. Jones, the African Methodists raised $50,000 in one year and cleared the institution of debt.

In this changing order, moreover, when the white administrators of Negro schools find themselves deprived of the former financial support received from the North, they veer around to the position of southern white people, accepting and sometimes enforcing in Negro institutions themselves the unwritten laws of caste that the white management may curry favor with the prejudiced community. As these administrators must under such circumstances lose the support of the Negroes and experience has not yet shown that many southern white men will make sacrifices for Negro education, the institutions in the hands of such misguided white friends of the Negro will probably suffer.

THE Negro church as a social force in the life of the race is nothing new. Prior to emancipation the church was the only institution which the Negro, in a few places in the South and throughout the North, was permitted to maintain for his own peculiar needs. Offering the only avenue for the expressional activities of the race, the church answered many a social purpose for which this institution among other groups differently circumstanced had never before been required to serve. It was, in the first place, a center at which friend looked forward to meeting friend, contact with whom was denied by the rigorous demands of slavery. It was then a place of enlightenment through the information disseminating from the better informed or by actual teaching in the Sunday school. It served often as an outlet for expression of the Negro social mind, now for a renewed determination to break their chains through prayer, then to resort to concerted action on the basis that he who would be free must himself first strike the blow.

After the emancipation, moreover, the Negro church developed a social atmosphere which somewhat strengthened its hold on the youth about to go astray. Not only education found its basis in the church, but fraternal associations developed therefrom. Business enterprises accepted the church as an ally, and professional men to some extent often became dependent thereupon. Most movements among the Negroes, moreover, have owed their success to the leadership of Negroes prominent in the church. No better examples can be mentioned than W. W. Browne, a minister who organized the True Reformers fraternity; W. R. Pettiford, another preacher, who became one of the pioneer Negro bankers; John R. Hawkins, the Financial Secretary of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who in applying efficiency to the business of his office secured for his denomination an unusually large income, and Dr. W. F. Graham, who in addition to his significant achievements in the church, has well invaded various businesses, in which he has exhibited evidence of unusual ability.

Since the Civil War, the Negro church as a factor in general uplift has become what the oppressed Negro longed to make it prior to that conflict. In the first place, Negroes regularly attend church whether Christians or sinners. They have not yet accumulated wealth adequate to the construction of clubhouses, amusement parks, and theaters, although dance halls have attracted many. Whether they derive any particular joy therefrom or not, the Negroes must go to church, to see their friends, as they are barred from social centers open to whites. They must attend church, moreover, to find out what is going on; for the race has not sufficient interests to maintain in every locality a newspaper of its own, and the white dailies generally mention Negroes only when they happen to commit crimes against white persons. The young Negro must go to church to meet his sweetheart, to impress her with his worth and woo her in marriage, the Negro farmer to find out the developments in the business world, the Negro mechanic to learn the needs of his community and how he may supply them.

Attached to the church is the Sunday school. Many a Negro had in attending it learned clandestinely to read and write before the war. Now they without fear of punishment eagerly studied in the churches on Sunday, learned the alphabet, the spelling of words with one, two and three syllables, and finally to read the Bible, that they might know for themselves the truths hitherto kept from their fathers but now revealed to their children in freedom. Education here was decidedly easy, the motive actuating the student being the immediate results in the form of a better knowledge of one's Christian duty and the reward awaiting the faithful. Many of these Negroes often learned more on a single Sunday than the average student acquired in a day school during a week. In these Sunday schools, not a few Negroes laid the foundation for the more liberal education which they thereafter obtained in the schools established by the religious and philanthropic friends of the Negroes working in the South immediately after the Civil War.

The church not only promoted education through the pulpit and Sunday school, but through its emphasis on the Bible unconsciously stimulated the efforts toward self-education. Whether a Negro attended Sunday school or not, he heard read to him from the Bible two or three times a week dramatic history, philosophical essays, charming poetry, and beautiful oratory. Hearing these repeated again and again and under circumstances securing undivided attention, he had many of these precious passages sink into his heart like seed planted in fertile ground to bring forth fruit fourfold. Under the continuous instruction of the Negro preacher, who in expounding the Bible drew such striking figures and portrayed life, death, and the beyond in a dramatic fashion, the youth not only experienced the emotion so characteristic of the Negro communicant but had his intellectual appetite whetted with the desire to seek after the mysteries.

The majority of Negroes, therefore, became Bible readers. Reading the Bible, they not only found what a minister of limited education could point out, but facts drawn from the best thought of the ancient world. And it was not mere reading; for many of them committed to memory choice passages of the Scriptures. Hundreds of them could recite accurately chapter after chapter of the treasures of Holy Writ; almost as many could give a crude but logical exposition of these literary treasures. From the study of the Bible the Negro developed, moreover, a desire for Biblical literature. He heard the moral appeal and gladly accepted the message to those in quest of the higher life in Christ.

This influence of the Bible, moreover, did more than lead to the reading of literature of a kindred nature. Some read books on ancient and medieval history, and finally works on the history of modern Europe. Others more seriously concerned were by this mere exposition of the Scriptures led to study collaterally commentaries on the Bible and to take up theology. In this they exhibited the power of self-education which with a strong spirituality combined with unusual imagination made so many Negroes preach with success. They had no more formal education than to read, and that was often picked up in the Sunday school; but they had the experience of a seeker, the light of the Bible, and the guidance of men who eloquently expounded it to the waiting multitude. These they freely drew on and from them they obtained help abundantly. Crude sometimes as the language might be, the thought of this self-made philosopher was original and few heard one preach without wondering how men of limited opportunities could speak so fluently and wisely.

THE student of this phase of history will naturally inquire as to the actual results from all of these efforts to promote the progress of Christianity among these people. Here we are at a loss for facts as to the early period; but after 1890, when the first census of Negro churches was taken, we have some very informing statistics: and although the general census of 1900 took no account of such statistics, the United States Bureau of the Census took a special census of religious institutions in 1906, basing its report upon returns received from the local organizations themselves. The items of this report covered the membership, places of worship, seating capacity of the edifices, the value of church property, and the number of ministers. There were reported also the number and value of parsonages, the debt on church property, and later the statistics of Sunday schools.

Summarizing the details, the census showed that in 1906 there were 36,770 Negro church organizations with a membership of 3,685,097. They had 35,160 church edifices and 1,261 halls used as places of worship, affording a seating capacity of 10,481,738. There were 4,779 parsonages worth $3,727,884, whereas the church edifices were worth $56,636,159. The debt on such church property, however, was $5,005,905. These churches had 34,681 Sunday schools administered by 210,148 officers and teachers in charge of 1,740,009 scholars.

Comparing these statistics of 1906 with those of 1890, one sees the rapid growth of the Negro church. Although the Negro population increased only 26.1 per cent during these sixteen years, the number of church organizations increased 56.7 per cent; the number of communicants, 37.8 per cent; the number of edifices, 47.9; the seating capacity, 54.1 per cent; and the value of church property, 112.7 per cent. The proportionately smaller increase in the membership is accounted for by the discovery of an overstatement of this item through error by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1890, which in 1906 was corrected. It is worthy of note here that the number of halls decreased, showing that they gave place to permanent buildings for those who had been housed in temporary quarters.

The distribution of these churches is of value to determine the extent of this progress. Over 90 per cent of the organizations were in the South, where the large majority of the Negroes are. Because of the social and economic conditions in that section, however, the proportion of the total value of church property was smaller, being only 73.5 per cent, and the proportionate amount of debt on church property accordingly smaller, being 53.1 per cent. Considering State by State, one finds that the southern group, of course, took the lead, whereas Idaho, Nevada, New Hampshire, North and South Dakota, and Vermont reported no Negro churches at all in 1890; but South Dakota and New Hampshire carried such an item in their returns in 1906. Georgia held first rank in the number of Negro communicants in 1890 and 1906, while Alabama advanced from third to second place in 1906, and Mississippi from the sixth in 1890 to fourth in 1906. Oklahoma did the unusual thing of advancing from the thirty-third place in 1890 to the twentieth in 1906. Most of these changes, however, followed corresponding changes in the Negro population of these States, resulting not every time as a natural increase but from migration.

A smaller number of Negro communicants were distributed among 18 white organizations in 1906. Between 1890 and 1906, however, the Southern Baptist Conventions and the Evangelical Lutheran churches lost their Negro members; but for the first time the following reported Negro churches in 1906: The Advent Christian Church, the Seventh Day Adventists, the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America, the General Eldership of the Churches of God in North America, the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, the Moravian Church, the Reformed Church in America, and the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Other difficulties arise in making the comparison here; for the Colored Primitive Baptists were not reported as a separate denomination in 1890, but in 1906 they, with the exception of four churches of this faith, constituted a body of their own. The white denomination reporting the largest number of Negro members was the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The sectarian would be interested in learning, moreover, the progress reported for the various denominations. The greater achievements were accredited to the 11 exclusively Negro organizations reporting in 1890 and the 17 of this same composition making returns in 1906. These were Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, with a sprinkling of such smaller groups as the Church of God and Saints of Christ, organized in 1896; Churches of the Living God, organized in 1899; the Voluntary Missionary Society in America, organized in 1900; the Free Christian Zion Church of Christ, organized by Schismatic Methodists of all sects in 1905; the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Union Methodist Protestant Church, organized in 1866; the Reformed Union Apostolic Church, organized in 1882; and the Reformed Methodist Union Episcopal Church, organized in 1896. While these smaller bodies were developing between 1890 and 1906 there disappeared other small Negro national church organizations known as the Congregational Methodist Church and the Evangelical Missionary Church. Of the distinctly Negro denominations, the one reporting the largest number of communicants was the National Baptist Convention. Following thus in the order of their numerical rank came next the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

Further statistics show more definitely the progress along sectarian lines. In 1906 the six Baptist bodies reported 19,891 organizations with 2,354,789 communicants and church property valued at $26,562,845. The ten Methodist bodies combined came second with 15,317 organizations, 1,182,131 communicants and church property valued at $25,771,262. Taken together, the Methodists and Baptists had 35,208 or 95.8 per cent of the total number of Negro organizations; 3,536,920 or 96 per cent of the total number of Negro communicants and $52,334,107 or 92.4 per cent of the total value of church property.

Other statistics show further tendencies of little importance. The marked increase in the number of Free Baptists between 1890 and 1906 is accounted for by better returns the latter year. The falling off of the Disciples of Christ was said to be due to the change resulting from separation of the Disciples and the churches of Christ. There were, moreover, during the same period significant changes in the membership of the Negroes in such white organizations as the Roman Catholic, the Congregational, the Presbyterian, and the Episcopal churches.

The progress of the Negro church, however, has been made, as shown above, in the denominations organized and controlled exclusively by Negroes. In 1906 they had 85.4 per cent of the organizations, 87 per cent of the membership, 83.2 per cent of the scholars in the Sunday School; 78.9 per cent of the value of the church property, 74.5 per cent of the total amount of the debt on church property, and 67 per cent of the value of parsonages. The statistician accounts for the relatively larger proportion of the value of property and debt among the partly Negro denominations by the fact that these organizations are largely in Northern States where church buildings are of better type and parsonages more common. These figures show that the Negro denominations are growing more rapidly than the others. The statistician says: “While in 1890 they had 81.7 per cent of the organizations against 18.3 per cent for the other class, in 1906, they reported 85.4 per cent, while in the past Negro bodies had dropped 14.6 per cent.” The variations, instead of refuting this statement, tend to confirm it. The National Baptist Convention, for example, dropped from 53.4 per cent to 50.4 per cent in organizations but advanced from 50.4 per cent to 61.4 per cent in membership and from 33.9 per cent to 43.1 per cent in value of church property. The Northern Convention showed a decrease in every item as to its report on the Negro membership. The African Methodists apparently fell behind but the difference was due not to any actual decrease in membership but to more accurate returns as is confirmed by more recent reports in their histories and their year books. The Presbyterians and Congregational churches show a slightly increased percentage in membership but a decreased percentage in value of property. The Protestant Episcopal Church reported a general increase, especially in the value of church property. The percentages of increase in the case of Catholic Churches are not striking except in the case of membership. These last mentioned denominations, moreover, still have a comparatively small following among the Negroes.

The Bureau of the United States Census has fortunately compiled statistics to show even the sex of these communicants. These tend to confirm the oft repeated declaration that the women largely support Negro churches. “Of the total number of organizations reported,” says the statistician, “34,648, or 94.2 per cent, made returns showing the sex of communicants or members, and the number thus reported, 3,527,660 was 95.7 per cent of the total membership. Of this number 1,324,123, or 37.5 per cent, were males, and 2,203,537, or 62.5 per cent, were females. As compared with the figures for all religious bodies, white and Negro, which show 43.1 per cent males and 56.9 per cent females, they indicate a greater preponderance of females in Negro bodies.” The census reports account for this difference in contending that the Roman Catholic bodies, among which the proportion of males is relatively large (49.3 per cent), constituted over 36 per cent of the total church membership reported by the census of 1906, but only one per cent of the Negro church membership. In the total Protestant church membership the percentage of females is 60.3, or only slightly lower than that of the membership of the Negro churches alone.

The few denominations which show the larger proportion of males are the Catholics with 47.5 per cent, the colored Cumberland Presbyterian, 46.5 per cent, and the United American Free-will Baptist Church, 43.9 per cent. Those showing the smallest proportion of males are the Protestant Episcopal Church, with 35.2 per cent; the Colored Primitive Baptists in America, 35.7 per cent, and the Northern Baptist Convention, 35.9 per cent.

Statistics of the Sunday schools exhibit direct evidence as to how largely this institution functions in the religious life of the Negroes. The Bureau of the Census believes that the most significant fact regarding the Sunday schools reported by Negro churches is the exceptionally large proportion of organizations reporting them. “Whereas the percentage of all church organizations in the United States reporting Sunday schools,” says the census, “was only 79 per cent, 91.2 per cent of the entire number of Negro organizations made such a report. The two classes of denominations are nearly even, the rate for the exclusively Negro bodies being a little lower than that for Negro organizations in other bodies. Among the single denominations, those showing the highest percentage of Sunday schools, as compared with the total number of organizations, are the Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church, with 98 per cent, and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, with 97.1 per cent. The denominations showing the lowest percentage, as compared with the total number of organizations, are the Colored Primitive Baptists in America, with 20.8 per cent, and the United American Free-will Baptists, with 39.9 per cent. Of all the Sunday schools given, the National Baptist Convention reported 17,910, or 51.6 per cent, a little more than one-half; the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 18.1 per cent; the Methodist Episcopal Church, 10.8 per cent; the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 6.7 per cent, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 6 per cent. These five bodies reported 32,360 Sunday schools, or 93.3 per cent of the total number reported by Negro organizations. The statistics as to officers, teachers, and scholars show about the same proportions.

The report on Negro ministers shows a very rapid increase, in fact, a much larger number than in the case of other professional men among Negroes. The results show that although when brought into comparison with the white race the professions among Negroes are generally undermanned, the Negro ministry, so far as numbers are concerned, is well supplied. In 1906 there were 31,624 Negro ministers. The Baptists then had 17,117, the African Methodist Church 6,200, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church 3,082, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church 2,671, the Colored Primitive Baptists in America 1,480, the Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church 375, and the United Free-will Baptists 136. The remaining number of ministers were distributed among the smaller denominations.

Another essential in the estimate of the religious progress of the Negro is the work done by the churches for their expansion into neglected parts. It has been said that the Negroes of the United States annually contribute more than $125,000 to home missions, supporting about 250 home missionaries and aiding more than 400 churches in backward districts. Owing to the recent migration resulting in all but the depletion of many churches in the South, and the necessity for others in the North, there has been much stimulus from without in some centers where churches have had little support from those migrants primarily interested in economic gain. Ever alive to the situation, however, the various Negro denominations have raised large sums to organize and maintain new churches wherever these migrants of color have settled in large numbers.

In foreign missions the Negro denominations have done almost as well. They annually contribute to this work more than $150,000. While some of this sum has been expended in promoting this cause in various foreign fields, the larger portion of it, by special designation, has been used in countries having a preponderance of Negro population, especially in Africa. The Negro Baptists, through the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention, the work of which is directed by that untiring apostle to the lowly, Dr. L. G. Jordan, carries on missionary work in five foreign countries. This body has established 61 stations, 83 out-stations, and 43 churches, having altogether 14,700 communicants, among whom are 43 native workers and 451 assistants. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, having organized their mission work earlier than the Baptists—that is, in 1844, whereas the Baptists did not organize theirs until 1880—have been more successful abroad. This denomination has invaded as many as eight foreign countries. Most of its efforts, however, have been restricted to Africa, where this denomination has two bishops reaching 17,178 members through 118 ordained ministers and 479 local preachers and teachers. This work in Africa was promoted largely through Bishops Levi J. Coppin and J. Albert Johnson, who, transferred to districts in this country, are still rendering their denomination valuable service. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which did not organize its foreign mission work until 1892, has established three foreign mission stations, five out-stations, and eleven churches. Other denominations have also done much to support missionary effort in foreign parts.

To promote Christian education both at home and in foreign fields these denominations have well supported publishing houses. The Colored Methodists have for a number of years had a successful plant for this work, which reached a stage of progress under its efficient agent, Dr. J. C. Martin. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was earlier in the field and saw the work recently expanded under the well-known Dr. J. W. Crockett. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, a pioneer in this enterprise, has easily taken the lead in this work among the Negro churches, especially under such efficient managers as Dr. R. R. Wright, in charge of the Publishing House and editor of The Christian Recorder in Philadelphia, under Dr. R. C. Ransom, the brilliant editor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, and under the progressive Ira T. Bryant, the director of the publications of the Sunday School Union in Nashville, founded by Bishop C. S. Smith. The Negro Baptists, having become enraged at the refusal of the white Baptists to recognize them as constituents of an all comprehending denomination, organized the National Baptist Convention, which accepted as one of its most important concerns the establishment of The National Baptist Publishing House. After attaining a high degree of success under the efficient Dr. R. H. Boyd, however, this establishment became the business of only that portion of the Baptists who supported Dr. Boyd in his efforts to direct the work on what his opponents called a private basis. The other Baptist faction has established another publishing house in Nashville.

Still another idea of the growth of the Negro church may be obtained from the statistics as to their administrative officers. The work of the Negro denominations has grown to the extent that the African Methodist Episcopal Church has fifteen bishops and nine other administrative officers, the Colored Methodists seven bishops and eleven other administrative officers, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church ten bishops and fifteen other administrative officers. The affairs of the National Baptist Convention, incorporated, are administered by thirteen officers, and the National Baptist Convention, unincorporated, by an equal number of functionaries. These, however, are not all regularly engaged in administrative work as in most of the Methodist denominations. The smaller groups of Baptists and Methodists show here and there top-heavy administrative staffs, whereas very large groups of Negro members in white churches have fewer supervisors. The Methodist Episcopal Church, however, has for some years maintained for the Negroes abroad a missionary bishop, in the capacity of whom Bishops Alexander P. Camphor and Isaiah B. Scott have served. The noble fight as indicated by favorable ballots taken in various conferences, moreover, all but resulted in the election of the eloquent Dr. J. W. E. Bowen as a regular bishop. Becoming sufficiently liberal, however, to override race prejudice, the Conference of 1920 not only chose as bishop for Africa that pleasing preacher and successful pastor, Dr. M. W. Clair, but at the same time set apart for the New Orleans diocese the scholarly and brilliant editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate, Dr. R. E. Jones.

THESE new developments have kept the Negro ministry still attractive, but because of many undesirable situations here and there in the church comparatively few young men have, during the last decade or so, aspired to this work. Some young Negroes have learned to look upon the calling as a necessary nuisance. Except in church schools where the preparation for the ministry is an objective, it has often been unusual to find one Negro student out of a hundred aspiring to the ministry, and too often those who have such aspirations represent the inferior intellect of the group, as it happened in the church during the middle ages. So rapidly did the ministry fall into discredit in many quarters a few years ago that most women of promise would not dare to engage themselves to men who thought of becoming clergymen; and, if the marital connection happened to be effected before the lot of the bride was known, it was in many cases considered a calamity. Because Negroes now realize how limited the opportunity for the race is in politics and some of the professions, however, the ministry will doubtless continue, as it has since the Reconstruction, a sort of avenue through which the ambitious youth must pass to secure a hearing and become a man of influence among his people. This does not mean that irreligious men will masquerade as spiritual advisers but that, inasmuch as the church as an institution is considered a welfare agency as well as a spiritual body to edify souls, some Negroes, interested in the social uplift of the race, are learning to accomplish this task by accepting leadership in the church.

Negroes see in the ministry, moreover, a new mission. The world, having now gone mad after the trifles of this life, is sadly in need of a redeemer to save men from themselves. In the contest between selfishness and godliness the former has been victor in the soul of the American and European. There are those like Bishop John Hurst believing that the Negro church must play the rôle of keeping the fire burning on the altar until the day when men again become reverent, and that the Negro's liberal interpretation of the Christian religion, based upon the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, must gain ascendancy and be accepted by a regenerated world of to-morrow.

As a preparation to this end the afflictions of the Negro have adequately developed self-control in the race. The watchword of the Negro church has been patience while waiting on the Lord. The Negro has learned not to avenge his own wrongs, believing that God will adjust matters in the end. The Negro agrees with Professor Joseph A. Booker, that he that taketh up the sword shall perish by the sword. Even during these days, when we learn much about the lawless, the behavior of the Negroes is no exception to the rule. An investigation shows that the Negroes never do any more than to defend themselves in keeping with the first law of nature. White persons who once found it possible to intimidate the whole group by shooting or lynching one or two now face persons of color bent upon defending their homes. At heart, however, the Negro is conservatively Christian and looks forward to that favorable turn in the affairs of man when the wrongs of the oppressed shall be righted without the shedding of blood.

The Negro church is criticized by a few radical members of the race as a hindrance to the immediate achievement of the aims of the race, in that the white race in the exercise of foresight encourages and even subsidizes the Negro ministry in carrying out this conservative program. This will tend, it is said, to keep the Negro down, whereas the white people themselves do not actually believe in such doctrine; for their own actions show that they use it as a means to an end. This, however, is hardly a fair criticism of the Negro church of to-day. No force from without can claim control of this institution, and certainly no one can bridle its fearless speakers who stand for the Negro of to-day. The Negro churchmen, moreover, are not any more conservative than other leaders of the people. They may be more generally effective because of their greater influence. That the Negro church is conservative is due to teaching and to tradition, and it is fortunate that Providence has had it so. Acting as a conservative force among the Negroes, the church has been a sort of balance wheel. It has not been unprogressive but rather wise in its generation in not rushing forward to a radical position in advance of public opinion. In other words, the Negro church has known how far it can safely instruct its people to go in righting their own wrongs, and this conservatism has no doubt saved the Negro from the fate of other oppressed groups who have suffered extermination because of the failure to handle their case more diplomatically.

This does not mean, however, that the Negro church of to-day is not alive to the sufferings of the race and is not critical of the attitude of the so-called Christian elements in this country. Some Negro ministers like Dr. F. J. Grimké are decidedly outspoken, even to the extent of being classed with the militant Reds now being deported. Dr. Pezavia O'Connell, a gentleman of scholarship and character, has all but suffered professional martyrdom because he has always fearlessly championed the cause of the Negro. Inasmuch as such an advanced position does not always harmonize with the faith of his communicants, he has been proscribed in certain circles. R. W. Bagnall, George Frazier Miller, and Byron Gunner have actually preached the use of force and encouraged resistance to the mobs to the extent that some Negroes have probably addressed themselves vindictively to the task of retribution. Through the Negro churches, and these alone, have the Negroes been able to effect anything like a coöperative movement to counteract the evil influences of such combinations against the race as the revived Ku Klux Klan.

The church then is no longer the voice of one man crying in the wilderness, but a spiritual organization at last becoming alive to the needs of a people handicapped by social distinctions of which the race must gradually free itself to do here in this life that which will assure the larger life to come. To attain this the earth must be made habitable for civilized people. Funds are daily raised in Negro churches to fight segregation, and an innocent Negro in danger of suffering injustice at the hands of the local oppressor may appeal with success to the communicants with whom he has frequented a common altar. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would be unable to carry out its program without the aid of the Negro church.

Although Negroes are not now attracted to the church as much as formerly, the census reports still show that there are more Negroes in the ministry than in any other profession. The only really close competitor of the Negro in this profession is the southern white man. While the educated white men of the North are taking up scientific pursuits and business, the southern whites are carrying out their designs on the ministry, in keeping with the well-laid plans by which they have succeeded in getting partial control of the northern press. During recent years so many southern white students have crowded northern schools of theology that, in keeping with the spirit of Beelzebub, some of these institutions now deny Negroes admission. The pulpits of the North are being gradually taken over by the apostles indoctrinated by the medieval agents of race hate.

Since the Negro ministry is still the largest factor in the life of this race, it naturally conflicts with the propaganda of the ministry preaching caste. These representatives of the master and slave classes must, in the capacity of spokesmen of widely differing groups, work out the solution of the problems of the church in the United States; for either the one or the other must dictate the religious program of the economically mad North. The North cares little about priest-craft. The struggle there for dollars and cents and for opportunities to spend them in riotous living is too keen to spare time for such matters as Christian living and the remote hereafter. The South, on the other hand, has never lost its bearing. In spite of riots here and there and lynchings almost anywhere, that section still considers itself a Christian land and, in its way, has lifted high the name of Christ without being influenced by his life. The North, then, if it ever awakes from its lethargy, will probably accept either the principles of Jesus of Nazareth as they have been preached and practiced by the Negroes, or the Anglo-Saxon-chosen-people-of-God faith for which many misguided white communicants have jeopardized their own lives and have taken those of Negroes unwilling to worship at the shrine of race prejudice.

The white people of this country are not interested in the real mission of Christ. In the North the church has surrendered to the materialistic system and developed into an agency seeking to assuage the pains of those suffering from the very economic evils which the institution has not the courage to attack. In the southern portion of the United States, the white churches have degenerated into perfunctory machines engaged in the service of deceiving the multitude with the doctrine that the Anglo-Saxon, being superior to other races by divine ordination, may justly oppress them to maintain its supremacy and that the principles of Jesus are exemplified in the lives of these newly chosen people of God when they permit their so-called inferiors to eat the crumbs let fall by those whom their idol god has carefully selected as the honor guests at the feast. If the humble Nazarene appeared there disturbing the present caste system, he would be speedily lynched as he was in Palestine.

In spite of the Negroes' logical preaching of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, however, the North now seems inclined to accept the faith of the South. Science has long since uprooted the theory that one race can be superior to another, but the northern churches are loath to act accordingly. The same churches, which prior to emancipation, championed the cause of the Negro, are to-day working indirectly to promote racial distinctions. The southern white man, wiser in his generation than most of his competitors, easily realized that he could not legally reënslave the Negro, but early devised a scheme to convert the North to the doctrine of segregation, educational distinctions, and the elimination of the Negroes from the body politic, to make it improbable, if not impossible, for the Negroes to attain the status of white men. The Christian spirit of the North at first rebelled against the very idea; but, already pledged to the policy of the economic proscription of Negroes through trades unions, that section, once bristling with churches dominated by abolitionists, soon yielded to the temptation of sacrificing the principles of Jesus for dollars and cents. The Negro of to-day, therefore, is hated as much by the northern religious devotee as by the southern enthusiast at the shrine of race prejudice.