At a very early day the Methodist and Baptist churches had the largest number of colored followers in both town and city; but these as yet were not assembled in distinctive organizations. The right of the Negro, not only to govern but to direct his religious instruction, was bitterly contested, sometimes by force, at other times by law. The high-handed manner in which the ordinary rights of worship were denied the Negro led to the withdrawal of the majority of colored Methodists in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and South Carolina, and ultimately to the formation of the two denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, that became independent before the end of the first quarter of the last century.
As to the recognition of the right of colored Baptists to church fellowship, the white Baptists were more liberal, for we find an association of white churches recognizing the existence of a colored Baptist church at Williamsburg, in 1790.
The first colored Episcopal society was received into membership on the express condition that no delegate was to be admitted in any of the diocesan conventions.[1] As early as 1801 Rev. John Chavis, a Negro of North Carolina, was licensed by the Hanover Presbytery of Virginia as a missionary to his own people.[2] The incompatibility of an ordained minister of the same denomination being a slave was recognized in the manumission of Rev. John Gloucester, the slave of Rev. Gideon Blackburn, of Tennessee, on the organization of the first colored Presbyterian church of the country, at Philadelphia, in 1807, and the subsequent settlement of Rev. Gloucester as its pastor.[3]
That the white Baptists really manifested greater liberality in this period is obvious, because we also find Jacob Bishop, a Negro, the pastor of the First Baptist church of Portsmouth, Virginia, for a few years.[4] The church was a large and influential one, and the predecessor of Bishop, Rev. Thomas Armistead, had served with distinction as a commissioned officer in the Revolutionary War.
To-day at all the general conferences of the M. E. and M. E. South—both white—and of the A. M. E., A. M. E. Zion, and C. M. E. denominations—all colored—fraternal delegations are exchanged with all the courtesies bestowed by the two former on the two latter that should prevail among brethren. A further concession is seen in the fact of the elections of colored ministers of recognized scholarship and fitness to important secretaryships and an editorship by the powerful M. E. Church. Another illustration is the organization about thirty years ago by the M. E. Church South of its colored membership into the C. M. E. denomination and the liberal provision made by the former connection for secondary education in the Payne Institute, at Augusta, Georgia.
The Protestant Episcopal Church that forbade St. Thomas, Philadelphia, and St. Phillips, New York, to aspire to membership in diocesan conventions repealed this resolution after the breaking out of the Civil War and delegates from these and other colored parishes throughout the North and West, at least, find free admission.
Sixty years ago the application of so promising and talented a young man as Alexander Crummell to be matriculated as a student in any of the Episcopal divinity schools created a great shock in church circles, and his rejection is set forth at length in Bishop Wilberforce's History of American Episcopalianism; yet both at the New York and Philadelphia theological seminaries numerous colored clergymen, Episcopalian and others, now graduate with honor and distinction.
To-day in the House of Bishops there are two colored prelates of African descent, Rt. Rev. S. D. Ferguson, the Bishop of Africa, and the Rt. Rev. James Theodore Holly, the Bishop of Hayti; the former a native of South Carolina, the latter of the District of Columbia. Their welcome to the pulpits of many of the most exclusive Episcopal Churches and to the homes of their parishioners is in marked contrast to the greeting of the Negro by the same communion only two generations previously.
In the general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church to-day the presence of colored commissioners is no novelty, and the faculty of Biddle University, composed of colored professors, by the will of the Presbyterian Board of Education, shows what this conservative body has done in the recognition of Negro scholarship.
The conventions and associations of the Baptist Church in the South, where the bulk of the black race dwell, are still on the color line, yet there is progress towards true fraternal feeling here. Some years since "The Religious Herald," of Richmond, Virginia, the leading journal of that denomination in the South, announced among its paid contributors the name of a prominent colored divine.