The History of the Negro Church

by Carter Godwin Woodson

In the North the development of the Negro Baptists did not proceed so smoothly. In the first place, neither the majority of the Negroes nor a large percentage of the whites in that section belonged to the Baptist Church. The northern Negroes, moreover, had something to conjure with. Methodism among them was a radical independent movement offering liberty in a sphere in which the Negro had never freely moved. Many Negroes, therefore, heeded the call of the African Methodists to "come ye out from among them and work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Independent Methodists in the South, however, were more of an exception to the rule than was the case of the Baptists in the North, for the Negro Baptists had every opportunity so to worship God in the North, if they desired, whereas the independent Negro Methodists were actually prohibited from invading most of the South.

As a matter of fact the Baptist churches were among the first separate organizations established in the North for Negroes, and as the free Negroes and fugitives were in the course of time driven out of the South by the intolerable conditions obtaining there during the reactionary period, the northern Negro Baptist churches multiplied and their membership increased. Practically all large urban communities of the North had some Negro Baptists. Philadelphia was especially well supplied. There was the First African Church founded by Negroes in 1809, with a membership of 257, under Richard Vaughn in 1846. The Union Colored Church, with a membership of 200, was in charge of Daniel Scott. J. Henderson was the pastor of the Third African Baptist Church, with a membership of only 61, and William Jackson ministered to a similar number in the so-called African Church.

Farther north the Baptists were also making progress. The Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City was, in 1846, doing well under the direction of Rev. Sampson White, with a membership of 424. In Boston the African Baptist Church had held its own, but in New England, where the abolition sentiment was developing and there resulted a more healthy sentiment in behalf of fairness for the Negro, the independent movement among Negro Methodists and Baptists was not generally considered necessary. Negroes were accepted in white churches and heard preached and saw practiced the principles of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. Only in centers of large Negro population then, as in Boston, Providence, Newport, New Haven and Hartford, did the Negroes tend largely to separate from the whites.

To the west, however, where came Negroes fleeing from the persecution of the southern whites, independent churches flourished much better. Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago soon found Baptist as well as Methodist churches common. Some of the pioneers in the group of Baptists were Richard DeBaptiste of Detroit and later of Chicago, and James Poindexter of Columbus. These in the course of time so rapidly increased that the Negro Baptists finally established an independent connection, the Providence Baptist Association, the first Negro body of the kind in the United States, organized in Ohio in 1836. Such was the case in Illinois where the Baptist churches of St. Clair and Madison counties, of Shawneetown, Vandalia, Jacksonville, Springfield, Galena, and Chicago, representing about twelve churches, organized in 1838 the Wood River Baptist Association. Feeling that there was a need for a still larger body, the churches of these parts organized in 1853 the Western Colored Baptist Convention.

The progress of these independent churches in the west suffered no interruption until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, when many Negroes who had escaped from the South and settled in these cities had to flee to Canada for safety. In Canada West, the various settlements saw the influence of the Baptists and Methodists extended, but for a long time there had been a Baptist church in Toronto which under Rev. W. Christian was flourishing in 1846, and the Methodists soon made there a more systematic effort.

REV. LOTT CARY
A missionary to Africa.

CHAPTER VI THE SCHISM AND THE SUBSEQUENT SITUATION

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.