The History of the Negro Church

by Carter Godwin Woodson

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 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 pro-slavery church hierarchy hushed the Negro ministers loyally speaking for their people, the Negro 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, Gerrit 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 everything that tends to better the moral, social, religious and political condition of man."