The History of the Negro Church

by Carter Godwin Woodson

After having had read to this body the action of the conference it was suggested that a committee be appointed to find a new name for this proposed body. The name proposed was the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America, which was unanimously accepted. The body then proceeded to elect bishops. W. H. Miles was elected on the first ballot. Afterward R. H. Vanderhorst was also chosen. Bishops Paine and McTyiere then consecrated them the first two bishops of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America. Three additional bishops, L. H. Holsey, J. A. Beebe, and Isaac Lane, were elected and ordained in March, 1873.

BISHOP W. H. MILES,
of the C. M. E. Church.

The large body of Negroes, however, were attracted after the war not by the Methodist Church but by the Baptist. The freedom, which even prior to emancipation meant so much in the growth of the Baptists, was thereafter a still greater cause for their expansion. It was easier than ever for a man to become a prominent figure in the Baptist Church. While the Methodists were hesitating as to what recognition should be allowed the Negroes or whether they should be set apart as a separate body, the Negro Baptists were realizing upon their new freedom which made possible the enjoyment of greater democracy in the church. Every man was to be equal to every other man and no power without had authority to interfere.

This situation in the Baptist Church appealed very strongly to the then recently enfranchised Negro in the reconstructed States. As the white man of the South had over emphasized politics and the professions to the extent that these avenues in that section were overmanned, the Negro in his undeveloped state accordingly made the same mistake in trying to escape drudgery. A rather hard row to hoe, or an unusually heavy burden was too often abandoned on hearing a call to the ministry, and the devotee thus impressed had practically no difficulty in securing a hearing in this locally democratic Baptist Church. The grade of intellect possessed by the novice in this ministerial service had little to do with his acceptability; for there were all sorts of degrees of mental development among the freedmen and every man preferred to follow the one who saw the spiritual world from his own particular angle and explained its mysteries in the dialect and in the manner in which he could understand it. If in delivering the gospel message the verb might not every time agree with the subject, that had little to do with the power to start a soul on the way to glory.

Operating on this basis, local churches sprang up here and there as Baptist preachers, a law unto themselves, went abroad seeking a following. Out of some of these efforts came several good results. Many of the churches thus established have in our day developed into beacon lights. And so was it true of some of those churches which branched off from or drew out of the old Baptist Churches of long standing established years before the Civil War. There were not so many such African Baptist churches in the South during that period. Because of fear of servile insurrection the whites would not permit many Negro churches to have an independent existence. The pressure once removed, however, groups of Negroes long waiting for religious freedom found adequate opportunity for exercising it in the organization of numerous Baptist churches. This was not in all cases abruptly effected, for the Negroes had no church buildings of their own and could not easily purchase them; but in their poverty they made unusual sacrifices to meet this emergency and whites liberally inclined assisted them in the rapid promotion of this work. Yet this movement did not reach its climax until some years later; for the lure of politics presented another field of so much interest to the Negroes that even the preachers of long standing too often abandoned their posts altogether. After the Reconstruction, moreover, when the Negro in the South had been removed from politics, a much larger number of bankrupt leaders entered the ministry or devised schemes to make use of the various churches.

An impetus toward improvement came from mutual associations. The Baptist churches were not obligated to unite to form associations and when formed did not necessarily have to be bound by the action of these annual meetings; but immediately after the war Negro Baptist churches, which in the South had formerly been coolly received by white bodies and were not permitted to form associations of their own, readily united for mutual benefit in the exercise of their new freedom. In those meetings the uninformed heard of the urgent need to educate the masses, the duty of the ministry to elevate the laity, and the call upon all to Christianize the heathen. The periodical visits of white churchmen, interested either in the Negro or in exploiting them, brought new light as to what was going on in the other bodies conducted by men of higher attainments.

As the Negro Baptists, however, did not soon effect more potential organizations than the district Baptist Associations then composed of a few churches, they never had a national policy; and their local democracy would have furnished no machinery to carry out such a policy, if they had adopted one. To the State groups, then, must the reader look for the signs of progress and thanks to the genius of the Negro, such evidence was not long wanting.

The Negro Baptists of North Carolina organized the first State Convention in 1866. Alabama and Virginia followed in 1867, and very soon thereafter came Arkansas, Kentucky, and finally all of the States in the South. Immediately thereafter they began to affiliate with larger national bodies. The first of these larger groups was the Northwestern and Southern Baptist Convention, organized in 1864. In 1866 there was held an important convention in Richmond, when it was determined to consolidate all of the general interests of the Negro Baptists, the Missionary, the Northwestern and Southern conventions as one large body, to be called the Consolidated American Baptist Missionary Convention.[10]