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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 40. The Negro Church - 2. Some Historical Notes
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86o An American Dilemma
meetings completely free of whites, however, were secret ones. Free
Negroes, of course, continued to have their own churches, but a strong
effort was made to separate them completely from the slaves. Some whites
felt that only white ministers should be allowed to preach to Negroes, but
on the whole, as long as the Negro preacher kept to the subjects of God
and the other-world, and as long as he implanted a spirit of obedience to the
existing order and the white master, there was little attempt to replace
him. Undoubtedly the great bulk of the Southern Negro preachers advo-
cated complete acceptance of slave status.
Still, the church service was one of the few occasions when slaves were
allowed to congregate, when they could feel a spiritual union with other
Negroes, when they could fee] that they were equal to the white man—in
the eyes of God—and when they could see one of their own number, the
preacher, rise above the dead level of slavehood and even occasionally be
admired by white people. The slaves on a plantation could regard the
Negro preacher as their leader— one who could go to the white master
and beg for trivial favors.
In the North, the few Negro churches before the Civil War served
much the same functions as they do today. Many of them—^like some white
churches—were ^^stations” in the ‘‘underground railroad,” at which an
escaping slave could get means either to become established in the North
or to go to Canada. The Northern Negro church was also a center of Negro
Abolitionist activities. The slavery issue in national politics of these times
actually gave the Negro church in the North as great an interest and stake
in worldly affairs as it has today.
At the time of Emancipation probably only a minority of the Negro
slaves were nominal Christians.® At the end of the Civil War, there was,
on the one hand, an almost complete and permanent expulsion of Negroes
from the white churches of the South and, on the other hand, a general
movement among the Negroes themselves to build up their own denom-
inations. This period witnessed another wave of conversion to Christianity
of the Negroes and the firm establishment of the independent Negro
church. Southern Negro religious leaders were helped much by white and
Negro missionaries from the North. Observing the church situation in the
’seventies, Sir George Campbell gives the following picture of this religious
activity:
Every man and woman likes to be himself or herself an active member of the
Church. And though their preachers are in a great degree their leaders, these
preachers are chosen by the people from the people, under a system for the most
part congregational, and are rather preachers because they are leaders than leaders
because they are preachers. In this matter of religion the negroes have utterly eman-
* . only one adult in six was a nominal Christian.” (W. E. B. Du Bois, The
Negro [1915]. p. 227.)
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