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Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently
a little investigation reveals the curious fact that, in
the South, at least, practically every American Negro is a
church member. Some, to be sure, are not regularly enrolled,
and a few do not habitually attend services; but, practically, a
proscribed people must have a social centre, and that centre
for this people is the Negro church. The census of 1890
showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the
country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a
half millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight
persons, and in some Southern States one in every two
persons. Besides these there is the large number who, while
not enrolled as members, attend and take part in many of the
activities of the church. There is an organized Negro church
for every sixty black families in the nation, and in some
States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a
thousand dollars' worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six
million dollars in all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church
since Emancipation. The question now is, What have been
the successive steps of this social history and what are the
present tendencies? First, we must realize that no such institution
as the Negro church could rear itself without definite
historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we
remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in
America. He was brought from a definite social environment,
--the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief
and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was nature-worship,
with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences,
good and bad, and his worship was through incantation
and sacrifice. The first rude change in this life was the slave
ship and the West Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization
replaced the clan and tribe, and the white master
replaced the chief with far greater and more despotic powers.
Forced and long-continued toil became the rule of life, the
old ties of blood relationship and kinship disappeared, and
instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and polyandry,
which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It
was a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were
retained of the former group life, and the chief remaining
institution was the Priest or Medicine-man. He early appeared
on the plantation and found his function as the healer of the
sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the
sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one
who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment,
and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus,
as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits
allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under
him the first church was not at first by any means Christian
nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and
mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation,
and roughly designated as Voodooism. Association with
the masters, missionary effort and motives of expediency
gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after the
lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.
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