because, as he said, the flour the bread was made of had been stolen.
Some benevolently-inclined men and many religious zealots thought that religion and education was the “Open Sesame” by means of which the “salvation” of the Negro was to come. So they sent him money to build churches and to found great schools. Many, however, are now finding that though the Negro may have religion he has no morality; and that too often his education makes him unwilling to do what he can do and wish to do that for which he is unfitted or for which there is no demand. At present who can tell whether he is going forward or backward. Some one has said that there is going on side by side in the Negro people a minimum of progress with a maximum of regress.
However, the Negro takes great pride in his church, and in his way is intensely religious. The late Booker T. Washington said:
“Of these millions of black people there is only a very small percentage that does not have formal or informal connection with some church.”
It is, indeed, likely that more than one-half of the male Negro adults are actual members of church, while not more than one in four or five
white male adults have such connection. Notwithstanding such a showing, religion does not seem to have any controlling influence over the life and character of the Negro.
Nevertheless, the Negro enjoys his religion, for he is an emotional animal. It is the emotional element in religion that appeals to him and makes his face to shine. The promise of never-ending pleasure in a world to come may be but faintly comprehended by him, but the fear of a far off punishment deters him but little from crime. He is the optimist of the human race, and lives in the eternal present. He has no sorrows from the past, and no care except for the immediate future. He keeps without effort or intention two injunctions of Scripture: “Visit the sick,” and “have no care for to-morrow.”
He goes to camp meetings or revivals, sings, prays, and shouts until the small hours of the night. He may think he thus pays the Lord His due, even though the next day, if he works at all, he sleeps on the plow-handle, or with half-closed eyes cuts up the tobacco or the cotton.
However, he may be free from the painful necessity to work the next day, if his wife or mother should have just returned from a white neighbor with an “apronful,” even if he did not visit some
tempting smoke-house or hen-roost on the way home from his religious revelry.