University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XIII
THE NEGRO PREACHER AND THE NEGRO CHURCH

ONE of the interesting documents relating to
the early history of the Negro in the United
States is a paper, written in the quaint, old-fashioned
style of a hundred years ago, and entitled:
"Narrative of the Proceedings of the Coloured People
During the Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in
the Year 1793; and a Refutation of Some of the Censures
Thrown Upon Them in Some Publications."

In the year 1792 and 1793, Philadelphia was
stricken with a sort of plague. Hundreds of people
died and hundreds more left the city, frequently
leaving the dead unburied in the houses. It was
believed at this time that Negroes were exempt from
this epidemic and a call was made upon them to act
as nurses and to assist in burying the dead. After
the epidemic was over the terror-stricken inhabitants
returned again to the city and the charge was made
that the coloured people, who had acted as nurses,
had demanded exorbitant prices for their services.
The narrative to which I have referred is an answer
to that charge. In this account of the epidemic, the
authors tell how they were induced to take up this

work, not because of any reward for themselves, but
in answer to an appeal to the coloured people to
come forward and assist "the distressed, perishing,
and neglected sick."

The narrative goes on to describe the distress which
the plague brought on the city; it relates in detail
a number of instances of the heroism of Negro nurses
during the period when the city was in a condition
of panic fear; and concludes with a full account of
the way in which the monies, which came into their
hands, were expended. From this report it appears
that one hundred and seventy-seven pounds, of the
four hundred and eleven expended, was contributed
from their own pockets, not counting, as the report
adds, "the cost of hearses, and maintenance of our
families for seventy days, and the support of five
hired men during the respective times of their being
employed; which expenses, together with sundry
gifts we occasionally made to poor families, might
reasonably and properly be introduced to show our
actual situation in regard to profit."

This narrative of the plague in Philadelphia and
of the services of the coloured people to the citizens
during this trying period is the more interesting
because one of the authors of this account, Richard
Allen, was the founder and first Bishop of the African
Methodist Church and the other, Absalom Jones,
established the First African Church of St. Thomas,
which is sometimes called the first Negro church in

America, although it is probable that there were
several churches in some of the Southern states
which were earlier in origin.

Both Allen and Jones, who were the leaders of the
coloured people of Philadelphia at that time, had been
slaves and both had purchased their freedom.
Richard Allen was born February 14, 1760, a slave to
Benjamin Chew, of Philadelphia. He was afterward
sold with his father and mother, and his three
brothers and sisters, to a man by the name of Stokeley,
in Delaware. Of his master Richard Allen says,
in his autobiography, "He was more like a father to
his slaves than anything else."

After he purchased his freedom, Allen became
an itinerant preacher, working, meanwhile, as a common
labourer at whatever he could get to do. During
the Revolution he was employed as a teamster
hauling salt. He had his regular places of stopping
along the road, where he would preach to whoever
were willing to come together to listen to him.
In 1784, he attended the General Conference, at
Baltimore, Maryland, which was the first General
Conference of the Methodist Church in America,
and in 1786 he came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
About this time, because of the influx from the
country, the coloured population of Philadelphia was
increasing rapidly and the white congregation of
St. George's Church, where they attended, determined
to force them into the galleries. Allen had already

made a move in the direction of a separate church,
so that the coloured people were already prepared,
to some extent, for secession. The crisis was reached
one Sunday morning when the attempt was made
to move Jones and Allen from their accustomed
places in the body of the church into the gallery,
whereupon they and their followers rebelled and
walked out. On April 17, 1787, the coloured portion
of this congregation formed, under the leadership
of Allen and Jones, what was known as the Free
African Society. The preamble of the articles of
association, upon which this society was founded,
is interesting as showing the thoughts which were
stirring in the minds of the leaders of the coloured
people at that time. The preamble is as follows:

The Free African Society prepared the way for
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which

may be said to have come into existence four years
later, in 1790, when Allen and a few followers withdrew
from the Free African Society and started an
Independent Methodist Church. Allen's congregation
worshipped at first in a blacksmith shop on
Sixth, near Lombard Street. The other members
of the society then became members of the Episcopal
Church under the leadership of Jones and, in 1794,
built St. Thomas Church, at the corner of Fifth and
Philadelphia streets.

The little society maintained by Allen in the
blacksmith shop grew rapidly in membership.
Some time in 1794, also, Bethel Church was erected by
Allen and his followers. About this same time the
coloured people withdrew from the white congregations
in Baltimore and New York, and in 1816
a conference was held at the Bethel Church in
Philadelphia, which resulted in the establishment of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with
Richard Allen as first Bishop.

Six years after Allen withdrew from the Free
African Society in Philadelphia, coloured members
of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York
decided to hold separate meetings, in which they
"might have an opportunity to exercise their
spiritual gifts among themselves, and thereby be
more useful to one another." They erected a
church, which was dedicated in 1800, and to
which they gave the name, African Methodist

Episcopal Zion. This congregation formed the
nucleus of what is now known as the "Zion"
Methodist connection. From 1801 to 1820 this
organisation was under the pastoral supervision of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, but during that
time it had its own preachers. In 1820 this arrangement
was terminated and a union of coloured Methodist
congregations in New York, New Haven,
Long Island, and Philadelphia was formed. These
churches together became the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Connection.

Directly after the War the two coloured branches
of the Methodist Church invaded the Southern
states. At that time, there were 207,742 coloured
members of the Methodist Church, South. Within
a few years, much the larger proportion of the
coloured members of the Southern Methodist Church
joined either one or the other of the African Methodist
connections so that in 1866 the Methodist Church,
South, had only 78,742 coloured members. In that
year, the Church authorised these coloured members,
with their preachers, to organise separate congregations,
and in 1870 two Bishops were appointed
to organise the coloured conferences into a separate
and independent church. This new connection
took the name of the Coloured Methodist Episcopal
Church.

In 1908, representatives of the three coloured
Methodist connections met in the First Council of the

United Board of Bishops. This council met in
Washington, D. C. Its purpose was to bring the
three more important organisations among the
coloured Methodists into closer working relations
with each other, in the hope that eventually a compact
organisation might be formed which would
unite in one body more than 13,000 churches and
over 1,500,000 communicants.

The Negro seems, from the beginning, to have
been very closely associated with the Methodist
Church in the United States. When the Reverend
Thomas Coke was ordained by John Wesley as
Superintendent or Bishop of the American Society
in 1784, he was accompanied on most of his travels
throughout the United States by Harry Hosier, a
coloured minister who was at the same time the
Bishop's servant and an evangelist of the Church.
Harry Hosier, who was the first American Negro
preacher of the Methodist Church in the United
States, was one of the notable characters of his day.
He could not read or write, but he was pronounced
by Dr. Benjamin Rush the greatest orator in,
America. He travelled extensively through the
New England and Southern states and shared the
pulpits of the white ministers whom he accompanied.
But he seems to have excelled them all in popularity
as a preacher.

It is said that on one occasion, in Wilmington,
Delaware, where Methodism early became popular,

a number of citizens, who did not ordinarily attend
the Methodist Church, came together to hear Bishop
Asbury. The church was so crowded that they were
not able to get in, so they stood outside and listened,
as they supposed, to the Bishop, but in reality they
heard Harry Hosier. They were greatly impressed,
and before leaving, one of them was heard to remark
that "if all Methodist preachers could preach like
the Bishop, more of us would like to hear him."
Some one replied that "that was not the Bishop, but
his servant." This served to raise the Bishop still
higher in their estimation, for they concluded, if
the servant was so eloquent what must the master
be.[1] Harry Hosier remained popular as a preacher
to the last. Francis Asbury, Associate-bishop,
stated that the best way to get a large congregation
was to announce that Harry was going to preach.
He died in Philadelphia in 1810.

From the first the Methodist Church was strongly
anti-slavery although the sentiment against slavery
was always stronger in the North than in the South.
The struggle which led to the separation of the
Southern and Northern churches, in 1844, was brought
about because of the censure voted against Bishop
Andrew for having married in Georgia a woman who
owned slaves. But even after the separation, the
Southern organisation maintained, at least formally,

its protest against slavery. The first edition of its
discipline, in 1846, declared:

Methodism had started in England among the
poor and the outcast; it was natural, therefore, that
when its missionaries came to America they should
seek to bring into the Church the outcast and neglected
people, and especially the slaves. In some
parts of the South the Methodist meeting-houses
were referred to by the more aristocratic denominations
as "the Negro churches." This was due to
the fact that the Methodists often began their work
in a community with an appeal to the slaves.

Methodism began in the early part of the nineteenth
century in Wilmington, North Carolina, in
this way. A Methodist preacher by the name of
William Meredith began his work among the slaves.
Through the penny collections which he took from
the black people and the scanty contributions of the
poor whites, he purchased a lot and completed a
building. Bishop Francis Asbury visited the church

in 1807, and John Charles, a coloured preacher,
delivered a sermon in the same church at sunrise
the same day.[3]

The Methodist Church in Fayetteville, North
Carolina, was started earlier than that at Wilmington,
but in much the same way. The story of the
founding of that church is told in some detail in
Bassett's History of Slavery in North Carolina.
The author says:

During the Colonial times the Baptists, to which
denomination at the present time the majority of the
Negroes in the United States belong, were a persecuted
people, not only in New England but in Virginia.
At that time this sect drew its followers very
largely from the poorer people who did not own
slaves, and it was therefore natural that its members
should be opposed to slavery. The Baptist Church,
however, did not, as did the Methodists, make
an effort to draw the Negroes into the churches, but

took care to bring under religious influence the
slaves of their own members, and paid particular
attention to the relations of the master and slave.
In 1778, it was decided that a marriage between
slaves ought to be respected, even though it was
against the law of the land. In 1783 the Sandy
Creek Association of North Carolina declared that a
master should give his servants the liberty to attend
family prayers in his house, that he should exhort
them to attend, but not use force. Among the
older coloured bishops and ministers, in both the
Methodist and Baptist churches, there are a number
who attribute their religious life to the influence
and teachings which they received through
this personal contact with their masters and masters'
families.

John Jasper, the famous pastor of the Sixth Mount
Zion Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia, always
spoke with the greatest reverence of his former
master. The Reverend John Jasper was known as a
preacher for sixty years in and about Richmond,
twenty-five of which he was a slave. He became a
national figure as a result of his efforts to prove
by the Bible, that "the sun," as he put it, "do move"
Recently, William E. Hatcher, a Southern white
man, who knew Jasper for many years, admired
him for his sincerity and valued him for the influence
that he exercised over his people, has written the
story of John Jasper's life. One of the interesting

incidents related in this book is that of Jasper's
conversion. At the time this took place he was a
slave of Mr. Samuel Hargrove, and was employed
as a tobacco stemmer in a tobacco factory in Richmond.
One day he fell to shouting, while he was
at work, and nearly started a revival in the tobacco
factory. His master, hearing the uproar, called
him into the office. Jasper explained what had
come over him and that he really did not mean to
make any noise. His own account of what then
happened, which Mr. Hatcher has given in his own
words, is as follows:

Art'r awhile he say: "John, did you tell eny of'em in thar 'bout
your conversion?" And I say: 'Yes, Mars' Sam, I tell 'em fore
I kno'd lt, an' I feel like tellin' everybody in de worl' about it"
Den he say: "John, you may tell it. Go back in dar an' go up-stars
an tell 'em all 'bout it, an' den downstars an' tell de hogshed
men an' de drivers an' eberybody what de Lord has dun for you."

By dis time Mars' Sam's face was rainin' tears, an' he say: "John
you needn' work no mo' to-day. I giv' you holiday. Art'r you'
git thru tellin3 it here at de factory, go up to de house an' tell your
folks; go 'round to your neighbours an' tell dem; go enywhere
you wan' to an' tell de good news. It'll do you good, do dem good,'
an' help to hon'r your Lord an' Saviour."

John Jasper always contended that his master
made a preacher of him. "Oft'n as I preach," he
said in one of his sermons, "I feel that I'm doin'
what my ol' marster tol' me to do. If he was here
now, I think he would fil' up dem kin' black eyes of
his, an' say: 'Dat's right, John; still tellin' it; fly
like de angel, an' wherever you go carry de Gospel
to de people.'"[5]

John Jasper was born in 1812, and did not secure
his freedom until 1864. He preached, as slave and
freeman, for something over sixty years. When he
died, in 1899, the Richmond Dispatch said of him:

John Jasper was a survival of the ante-bellum
days. He was representative of the "old-time"
Negro preacher, of the men who were the natural
leaders of the slaves on the plantation. He lived in
a period, however, when, in many respects, the antebellum
preacher was on the decline. In the early
days, before the severe restrictions were put upon
the education of the slaves, many of these men were
educated and some of them preached in the white
churches.

Among the most noted of the early Negro preachers
was George Lisle, who began preaching to the slaves
at Savannah, Georgia, during the War of the Revolution.
After the evacuation of the country by the
British in 1782 and 1783 he went with his master to
Jamaica. The existence of the Baptist Church
among the Negroes in Jamaica is due to this man.
Before his departure for Jamaica he baptised a slave
of Mr. Jonathan Bryan, by the name of Andrew.

Andrew Bryan became in after years a great
preacher. At the present time there are two churches
in Savannah, one of them the Bryan Baptist in the
Yamacraw District and the other the First African,
both of which claim descent from the little congregation
of slaves which Andrew Bryan drew around him
in the years after his baptism and previous to 1788,

when he was solemnly ordained to the ministry and
his congregation formally constituted a church.

The story of the struggle of this little congregation
to maintain its existence against the prejudice that
existed at that time is interesting because it shows
the quality of some of these early slave preachers.
In his volume, "The Gospel Among the Slaves," the
Reverend W. T. Harrison, of the Methodist Church,
South, says of the origin of the First Baptist Church
in Savannah:

Toward the close of the year 1792, the Church
which Andrew Bryan had founded began to build a
place of worship. The city gave the lot for the
purpose and the building, which still stands on the old
site, though it is not the original structure erected in
1972, has become one of the historic landmarks of
the city.

Among the other famous ante-bellum Negro
preachers was a man known as Jack of Virginia, of
whom Dr. William S. White, of the Southern Presbyterian
Church, has written a biography. "Uncle
Jack," as he was popularly known, was an African
preacher of Nottoway County, Virginia. He had
been captured from his parents in Africa and brought
over in one of the last cargoes of slaves admitted to
Virginia. He was sold to a remote and obscure
plantation in Nottoway County which, at that time,
was in the backwoods where there was almost no
opportunity for religious life and instruction. In
some way or other, however, he came under the
influence of the Reverend Dr. John Blair Smith,
President of Hampden-Sydney College, and of Dr.
William Hill, and Dr. Archibald Alexander, of Princeton,
both of whom were at that time young theological
students. He learned to read from his master's
children and became, as Professor Ballagh says in
his work on Slavery in Virginia, "so full of the spirit
and knowledge of the Bible that he was recognised
among the whites as a powerful expounder of Christian
doctrine, was licensed to preach by the Baptist
Church, and preached from plantation to plantation
within a radius of thirty miles, as he was
invited by overseers or masters."

His freedom was purchased by a subscription of
white people, and he was given a home and a patch
of land for his support. It is said that he exercised

such remarkable control over the members of his
flock that masters, instead of punishing their slaves,
often referred them to the discipline of their pastor,
of which they stood in greater dread. Professor
Ballagh says that the most refined and aristocratic
people paid tribute to him, and he was instrumental
in the conversion of many whites. He preached for
forty years among blacks and whites alike, but
voluntarily gave up his preaching in obedience
to the law of 1832, which was passed as a result
of the Nat Turner Insurrection. Dr. William S.
White, his biographer, speaking of Jack of Virginia's
relations with the white people in his
neighbourhood, says:

Another noted Negro preacher was Ralph Freeman,
who was a slave in Anson County, North

Carolina, in the neighbourhood of the Rock River.
He was ordained a regular minister and travelled
about, preaching at various places in his own
and adjoining counties. It is said that the Rev.
Joseph Magee, a white Baptist minister, became
much attached to Ralph. They used to travel
and preach together and it was agreed between
them that the survivor should preach the funeral
of the one who died first.

It so happened that the Rev. Joseph Magee died
first and the task of preaching his funeral sermon fell
to Ralph. In the meantime, however, "his friend
had moved to the West, and the coloured preacher
was sent for all the way from North Carolina to
come and fulfil the promise he had made in
earlier years. Ralph Freeman continued to preach
for a number of years. At last his lips were
closed also, much to his sorrow, by the law
which forbade Negroes to preach to white congregations.

Although Negro Baptists did not succeed in
organising an independent National Church until
after the War, coloured Baptists were the first among
the Negroes to set up separate churches for themselves.
In 1836, coloured Baptists in the North
began to draw together. The Providence Baptist
Association was organised in that year in Ohio.
Two years later the Wood River Baptist Association
was organised in Illinois. These local or district

organisations, as they were afterward called, grew
rapidly after the Civil War. About 1876 the New
England states formed an organisation which aimed
to be national in its character. In 1880 the
Negro Baptists of the Southern states met at Montgomery,
Alabama, to form a Foreign Mission
Convention. Six years later the Southern states
formed the American National Convention, and
in 1894, at Montgomery, Alabama, measures were
taken to bring together into one organisation all
the coloured Baptist organisations in the United
States, seeking to be national in character. By
1897 this national Baptist organisation had been
completed.

According to statistics furnished by the eighty-nine
state organisations and six hundred district
associations there were, in 1908, 18,307 organised
Negro Baptist churches, and 17,088 ordained
preachers in the United States. According to these
same statistics the total membership of these churches
is 2,330,535. The total expenditures of the
coloured Baptist Church for church, Sunday-school
and educational work in 1907 is reported to have been
$2,525,025.66.

The two great independent Negro denominations,
the Methodist and the Baptist, were the first to
break away from the older church organisations of
the white people. These two organisations contain
by far the larger number of the Negroes of the

United States. Perhaps this is the reason that they
were the first to seek to establish independent Negro
churches. In all the other religious denominations,
with the exception of the Roman Catholics, Negroes
have separate churches, which stand in a relation of
greater or less dependence upon the denominations
to which they belong.

The Catholics were the first to send missionaries
to Africa. Therefore , the Catholic Church is the
First Christian Church into which Negroes were
received as members. As far back as 1490, two
years before the discovery of America, Catholic
missionaries visited the mouth of the Kongo River.
For several centuries after this a Negro Catholic
kingdom existed in that part of Africa. It was
eventually overthrown, as a result of wars with
neighbouring peoples. Saint Benedict, the Moor,
who died in Palermo, Sicily, in 1589, and was afterward
canonised by the Catholic Church, was the
son of a Negro slave woman. Some of the first
Negroes to reach America were Catholics. They
came over with the early Spanish discoverers.

Negro Catholics have never been numerous in the
United States, except in Maryland, which was a
Catholic colony, and in Louisiana. In 1829, a
number of Catholic refugees came to Baltimore from
Santo Domingo, and at this time there was founded,
in connection with the Oblate Sisters of Providence
Convent, the St. Francis Academy for Girls. The

Sisters of Providence, who founded the convent
and seminary, were coloured women who first came
to Baltimore with the Santo Domingo refugees.
A few years later, in 1842, an order known as the
Sisters of the Holy Family was founded among the
free coloured women of New Orleans. The sisters
of this order now have charge of three asylums,
one of which is the Lafon Boys' Asylum, donated
by Mr. Thomy Lafon, the Negro philanthropist,
in 1893. The same order carries on schools at
Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Madisonville and Lafayette,
Louisiana; at Galveston and Houston,
Texas; and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The same Sisterhood
has a government school at Stann Creek,
British Honduras.

Outside the Catholic Church the first religious
denomination in the United States to receive Negroes
was the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1624,
only five years after slavery was introduced into
Virginia, a Negro child named William was baptised
and from that time the names of Negroes can be
found upon the register of most of the older churches
in Virginia. The first eminent coloured minister
in the Episcopal Church in the United States was
Alexander Crummell, who was born in New York
City in 1818, but his father was a native of the Gold
Coast, Africa. After his graduation at Cambridge
University, England, Mr. Crummel went to Africa as
a missionary. He was for a time a professor in the

Liberian College, in Liberia. Later he returned to
the United States and was, for twenty-two years,
rector of the St. Luke's Church, Washington, D. C.
He is the author of several books upon Africa, and
upon the Negro in the United States. In 1897 he
established the American Negro Academy, which
was designed to bring learned men of the Negro race
together and to publish the results of their investigations,
particularly upon subjects of interest to the
Negro race.

Something like one hundred and fifty Negroes
have been ordained as ministers in the Episcopal
Church since Alexander Crummell entered that
ministry in 1839. In 1874, James Theodore Holly
was consecrated Bishop of Haiti and eleven
years later Samuel David Ferguson was made Missionary
Bishop of Cape Palmas, and adjacent
regions in West Africa. There are several Negro
archdeacons of the Episcopal Church in the Southern
states. One of them is James S. Russell, who
was a student at Hampton Institute, at the time
I was there, and is now principal of the flourishing
Episcopal school for Negroes at Lawrenceville,
Virginia.

For some reason or other, probably because its
teachings did not address themselves to the comprehension
of the slaves, or did not appeal to their
emotions, the Presbyterian Church was never as
popular among the coloured people as the Methodist

and Baptist churches were. Notwithstanding this
fact, there were numerous coloured people who were
members of the Presbyterian Church in the Southern
states before the War. Among them was one free
Negro by the name of John Chavis, who became
famous. He was a full-blooded Negro and was
born in Granville County, North Carolina, about
1763. He early in life attracted the attention of
the white people and was sent to Princeton College
as an experiment, to see if a Negro could take a
collegiate education. The experiment succeeded
and Chavis became so thoroughly educated that he
afterward became a minister and preached with
considerable success until 1831, when he was silenced
by the law forbidding Negroes to preach.

After that he set himself up as a school-teacher,
teaching in Granville, Wake and Chatham counties
in North Carolina. Among his patrons were the
best people in the neighbourhood. Willie P. Mangum,
afterward United States Senator, and Priestley
Mangum, his brother, Archibald and John
Henderson, sons of Chief-Justice Henderson, Charles
Manly, afterward Governor of the state, Dr. James
L. Wortham, of Oxford, North Carolina, and many
other men who did not become prominent, were his
pupils. Reverend James H. Horner, who is said to
have been one of the best teachers in North Carolina,
said of John Chavis: "My father not only went to
school to him, but boarded in his family. The

school was the best at that time to be found in
the state."

In his study of Slavery in the State of North
Carolina, John Spencer Bassett says:

After the Civil War large numbers, as many as
seventy per cent., it is said, of the coloured members
of the Presbyterian Church went into the African
Methodist and into the Baptist churches. Others
joined the Northern Presbyterian church, which
had begun to establish schools and missions in the
South among the Negroes directly after the War.
In 1902, the Presbyterian Church, North, had
eleven Presbyteries in the Southern states with
two hundred and nine ministers, only seven of
whom were white.

In spite of the large secession from the Presbyterian
Church, South, a considerable number of coloured
people still clung to the Southern branch of that
Church. In the latter part of the Nineties, however,
these coloured churches, at their own request, were
set apart from the white churches and organised
under the title of the Afro-American Presbyterian
Church.

The Congregational Church, through the medium
of the American Missionary Association, began,
directly .after the War, to raise large sums of
money and establish schools for the Freedmen. A
number of these schools, like the one at Hampton,
have now become independent of the organisation
which started them. But a large number of
schools are still being supported in different parts of
the South by funds of the American Board.
Around these schools there has usually grown up
a coloured Congregational church. At first, these
churches were located, for the most part, in the
cities, but in recent years as the schools in
the country districts have increased, the number
of churches outside the city has multiplied.
In 1902, the number of coloured Congregational
churches was 230; the number of ministers and
missionaries, 139, and the number of church
members, 12,155.[8]

In 1890, the United States Census Bureau undertook
a complete census of the religious denominations.
Since that time no complete and systematic
study of all the denominations has been made.
The following table, however, prepared by Dr.
H. K. Carroll, who had charge of the preparation
of the church statistics of the Eleventh Census,
although it does not agree entirely with the statistics
furnished by the religious societies, probably shows

pretty accurately the growth and relative percentage
of strength of the different denominations:
                                     

Denomination	Ministers	Churches	Communicants
Regular Baptist	13,751	19,030	1,864,877
Church of God (Baptist)	71	93	8,500
Christian	88	34	956
Union American Methodist Episcopal	138	255	18,500
African Methodist Episcopal	6,170	6,920	858,323
African American Methodist Protestant	200	125	4,000
African Methodist Episcopal Zion	3,986	3,280	583,106
Congregational Methodist	5	5	319
Zion Union Apostolic (Methodist)	30	32	2,346
Coloured Methodist Episcopal	2,727	2,758	224,700
Evangelical Missionary (Methodist)	92	47	5,014
Cumberland Presbyterian	80	150	13,020
Total	27,338	32,729	3,583,661
Coloured members in Methodist Episcopal Churches	2,161	3,611	299,985
Coloured members in other bodies (est'd)	900	1,400	150,000
Grand total	30,399	37,740	4,033,646
Grand total in 1890		23,770	2,674,177
Gains in eighteen years		13,970	1,359,469

These figures show that nearly half of the Negro
population of the United States are members of one
or the other of the great religious denominations.
This means that, among the Negro population, the
church plays a much more important part than it
does among the white population, since considerably

more than two-thirds of the white population are
not enrolled in any church organisation. The
influence of the Negro Church is particularly strong
in the Southern states. In fact there is hardly a
community or a plantation in the South so remote,
or so obscure, that it does not possess some sort of
place where the coloured people meet and worship.

These churches are not always what they should
be. The coloured preacher is often ignorant and
sometimes even immoral, but in spite of this fact the
Church remains the centre for all those influences
that are making for the welfare and the upbuilding
of the communities in which they are situated. All
these churches are connected more or less directly
with the larger denominational organisations and
thus serve, to some extent, to connect the people in
them with the life and progress of the outside world.

I shall have something to say in a subsequent
chapter in regard to the social work of the Negro
Church. I wish to emphasise at this point, however,
that the Negro Church represents the masses
of the Negro people. It was the first institution to
develop out of the life of the Negro masses and it
still retains the strongest hold upon them. As the
Negro Church grows stronger materially and
spiritually so do the masses of the Negro people
advance. There is no better indication of the
progress of the masses of the people than the growth
and development of these great Negro organisations.