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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 40. The Negro Church - 4. A Segregated Church
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Chapter 40. The Negro Church 871
Of the Protestant churches, the Congregationallsts and Quaker churches
have probably been most nearly equalitarian,^^ but they have made little
headway among Negroes. The Episcopalian and Christian Science churches
have in the North much the same policy toward Negroes as does the
Roman Catholic Church. A small but increasing proportion of upper and
middle class Negroes have joined these churches and have some contact
with the upper class whites who dominate them.^
The great majority of white churches, in the North as well as in the
South, thus do not want to have a substantial Negro membership. The
great majority of Negroes do not seem to want to join white churches, even
if they are allowed. As usual the caste separation has been fortified by its
own effects.
There is also astonishingly little interracial cooperation between the
white and Negro churches of the same denomination. In the South there is
practically no contact at all between Negroes and whites for religious pur-
to attend white churches. But even here, the dominant tendency is to keep Negroes in their
own churches, to prevent Negroes from joining in interchurch Catholic meetings or
celebrations, and to provide a separate set of white priests—who seldom mingle with
the other priests—for the Negroes. (See Allison Davis, “The Negro Church and Associa-
tions in the Lower South,’* unpublished manuscript prepared for this study [1940], p. 15,
fassim.) The Catholic Negro churches have—with rare exceptions—white priests. Accord-
ing to Gillard, there were only 23 Negro priests in the Roman Catholic Church in 1941,
and 6 of these were on foreign missions. (Cited in The Negro Handbooky pp, 102-103.)
* The Holiness Church, while predominantly white, has occasionally bi-racial congre-
gations. It has not been attracting many new members lately.
The small Bahai Church is in America dominated by upper class Northern whites who
have an explicit policy in favor of interracialism and internationalism. A small number
of upper class Negroes have joined. It is the only white-dominated church in which there
may be said to be absolutely no segregation or discrimination.
Similar to the Bahai Church in its principle against any form of racial discrimination,
but quite different in that it is Negro-dominated and in that it is patterned after the emotional
lower class type of Negro church, is the Father Divine Peace Mission movement. Estimates
of the total membership of this bizarre sect, which has attracted members in significant
numbers only since 1932, range up to 2 million (John Hoshor, God in a Rolls Royce [1936],
p. xi), but there is good reason to believe that it was less than 15,000 in 1940 (.Edward
Nelson Palmer, “Father Divine Peace Mission,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this
study [1940], Appendix C of Guion G. Johnson and Guy B. Johnson, of. cit.y p. 6.) Over
half the members are concentrated in New York City, and practically all the rest are in
other Northern and Western cities } there are practically no adherents in the South. Most
estimates have it that about 10 per cent of the members are white {tdein)y and one of the
strongest injunctions of the sect is against recognition of color differences. The relation
between the members is particularly intimate since they are enjoined to trade at “peace”
stores and many of the members live together in the several “Heavens” which Father Divine
has established in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. While racial differences are not
to be noticed, it must, of course, be important to his followers that God in the person of
Father Divine, is a Negro.
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