When the Word is Given... / A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World

by Louis E. Lomax

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?

Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell Old Pharaoh let my people go....

We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, every round goes higher and higher.... Soldiers of the Cross

Jordan’s river is chilly and cold, none can cross but the true and bold....

Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home....

Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world, going home to live with God....

At first it appeared that the American church would embrace integration of the Negro and lead the attack against the institution of slavery. In 1784, for example, the Methodist Church declared slavery “contrary to the golden laws of God” and went on to order its members to set all slaves free within twelve months. But Southern states led by Virginia forced a suspension of the resolution. Five years later the Baptist Church passed pretty much the same resolution. But it, too, recanted under pressure from the Deep South. Even so, many churches accepted Negroes as parishioners, though many whites feared that they could be flirting with disaster if they adopted a truly liberal policy with respect to Negro membership. By the same token, they were leery of all Negro churches on the plantation. They feared that Negro ministers and church officials would exercise considerable authority over their slave communicants and thus the church could become a center of rebellion. The American church was having other problems at the time, and its concern with the Negro question was not prime. The Anglican clergy, flouting their Toryism, were causing many American parishioners to seek complete disassociation from the Church of England. In fact, every religious denomination, with the exception of the Roman Catholic, was busy establishing an American wing of its church in the hope that it would be completely separate from its European sponsor. The Catholic Church itself finally acquiesced and became separate under the control of a special Prefect Apostolic. This intercontinental war between the churches of the New World and the Old eclipsed the problem of the Negro as far as white churchmen were concerned and set the scene for the establishment of separate churches for Negroes.

Negro Baptist churches began to sprout while the war for independence was still being waged. George Liele, a Negro leader, founded a Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia, in 1779 that became the nucleus of the Negro Baptists in that state. Virginia Negroes organized a Baptist church in Petersburg in 1776, in Richmond in 1780, and in Williamsburg in 1785. According to Dr. John Hope Franklin, many of the white clergy in Virginia assisted Negroes in setting up and organizing their separate churches.

It was in the North that the Negro church really burgeoned. Foremost among the Northern Negro churchmen was Richard Allen, an ex-slave who had purchased his freedom from his Delaware master in 1777, the year he also accepted Christ as his saviour. In 1786 Allen moved to Philadelphia and began to hold prayer meetings for Negroes. His efforts to establish a Negro church were opposed by whites and some Negroes. But when the officials of St. George’s Church, where Allen frequently preached, began to segregate a large number of Negroes who came to hear him, it became clear to Allen’s Negro detractors that the time was right for a Negro church. The final break came when white church officials pulled Allen, Absalom Jones, and William White from their knees while they were praying in what had been set aside as the white section of the church. An innately dramatic man, Allen led the Negroes out of St. George’s Church and organized Mother Bethel, now the central church of Negro Methodism. Allen and his followers organized what became the African Methodist Episcopal Church and by 1820 they had four thousand followers in Philadelphia alone. The organization spread as far west as Pittsburgh and as far south as Charleston.

In New York City, because of discrimination and segregation Negroes withdrew from the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church and established what is now the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, one of whose leading bishops is Dr. Stephen Gill Spottswood, the current chairman of the board of the NAACP. The same trend was developing among Negro Baptists of the North. In 1809 thirteen Negro members of a white Baptist church in Philadelphia were dismissed to form a church of their own. The Negro Baptists of Boston set up their own church in the same year under the leadership of Reverend Thomas Paul. At the same time he was shepherding the Boston congregation, Rev. Paul also organized a Negro Baptist church in New York City. The church was later named Abyssinian and is now pastored by the controversial minister-politician, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Both white and Negro clergymen agree that the development of separate churches was inconsistent with the teachings of religion, but the Negro clergymen were adamant, feeling that a separate church would give them an opportunity to develop leadership. More, there were theological points that Negro churchmen found difficult to accept. One was the notion, widely held among white Christians particularly in the South, that the Negro was the descendant of Ham, the son of Noah, who laughed at his father’s nakedness and thus doomed himself and his descendants to be hewers of wood and drawers of water—that is to say, servants—to the descendants of Noah’s other sons. This theological justification for the concept of Negro inferiority reached its peak during the early part of the nineteenth century, when a spurious body of anthropological and biological scholarship offered “scientific proof” of the Negro’s innate inferiority both as a spiritual being and as a person. It was the “Linnaean Web” that did it: scientists at that time completely embraced the notions of Linnaeus that the classification of peoples in terms of skull sizes and shapes as well as in terms of color was the first step toward knowledge. The American scene of the early 1800s was peopled with a variety of racial stocks, and the majority of the white Protestant group fell victims of the all-too-easy temptation to judge the worth of an individual merely by looking at the color of his skin or the shape of his nose. Thus, the image of the hook-nosed Jewish peddler; the drunken, shiftless Irishman; the stupid, soggy German; the hot-tempered Italian; and the ragged, lazy Negro.

Only in the Negro church, then, did the Negro find a sense of dignity and meaning. Only there was he made to feel a true and equal child of God. The Negro church developed a peculiar theology that spoke to the frustration of the American Negro, and it was there that the Negro translated Christianity into the hope of Negro deliverance.

But two factors, hardly noticed at the time, were to keep the Negro church from becoming a completely closed institution: first, the Negro church was a part of the Negro community, which was an affront to every sensitive Negro citizen; the Negro community was an enclave of terror and police brutality, and the growing ambition of every Negro was somehow to escape this troubled land and live out his days in a less menacing atmosphere. The other factor that operated against the Negro church was its consuming concern with the salvation of souls, the readying of men for full and total adjustment in the world beyond the grave. Like its white counterpart, the Negro church neglected the social ethic, was unconcerned about where men would live, what they would eat, and how they would clothe themselves on this side of the Jordan.

Meanwhile, the nation lunged from slavery through Reconstruction into the race riots of the early 1900s. White attitudes hardened, segregation signs sprouted over every bathroom and drinking fountain, in every railroad train and bus, and the white segregationist invoked the name of God to justify his lynchings, police brutality, injustice before the law, as well as the denial of every right the Constitution had given to the Negro.

Negro churchmen realized the situation was getting grave. A young theologian, Benjamin E. Mays, now President of Morehouse College, and one of the three American official mourners at the funeral of Pope John XXIII, wrote his doctoral thesis on the Negroes’ God. That was almost forty years ago, and even then Dr. Mays suspected that the Negroes’ religion had better take on more militancy and that this militancy should be rooted in some kind of God concept.