Black church

“ There is no need to attempt to corral all men of all races in one enclosure, but for any church, especially a church of the Puritans, to enter upon a missionary work in the South and initiate it by refusing to fellowship a black man because he is black, is to apostatize from the faith in order to get a chance to preach the faith." The doors of every Christian church ought to stand wide open to men of every race and color, and in all representative bodies these churches should be one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Race tastes and race affiliations will make for churches essentially white and essentially black. "But to close the door on any Christian is in so far to make it an unchristian church. To go into the South and establish white churches from which, whether by a formal law or by an unwritten but self-forcing edict, men are excluded because God made them black, is to deny one of the fundamental tenets of Christ. ”

“ They have been, and continue to be, community centers where we organize for jobs and justice; places of scholarship and network; places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harm’s way, and told that they are beautiful and smart -- (applause) -- and taught that they matter. (Applause.) That’s what happens in church.
That’s what the black church means. Our beating heart. The place where our dignity as a people is inviolate. ”

“ What are we doing to evangelize the negroes and build them up into Christian men and women? I will tell you a little of the work which I know myself, in my own State of North Carolina, in our two dioceses and our one missionary jurisdiction. Bishop Atkinson—our great Church Father during and after the Civil War—felt his responsibility for the souls of the black folk; and he and his successors have been in more or less degree pressing the work of the Church among the negroes. We have now in the State two arch-deacons, thirteen clergymen, 1,400 communicants and 35 parishes and missions. ”

“ I would aid them in church building. I would provide schools, separate from our own, for training black men to be pastors of black churches; and I would, if necessary, give ordination to enough men to form a separate Presbytery, when enough can be found possessed of constitutional qualifications. But I would make no black man a member of a white Session, or Presbytery, or Synod, or Assembly ”

“ In the Free States, on the other hand, a new and curious attempt at self-development was made. In Philadelphia and New York color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-religious institution among the Negroes known as the African Church,—an organization still living and controlling in its various branches over a million of men. ”

“ Answers to such questions can come only from a study of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of Chicago.
Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries. The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts. ”

“ Catholics were thrown into violent economic competition with slaves and free Negroes, and their fight to escape slave competition easily resolved itself into a serious anti-Negro hatred which was back of much of the rioting in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and New York. It was not then until the 20th century that the church began active work by establishing a special mission for Negroes and engaging in it nearly two hundred white priests. ”

“ The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. ”

“ Half-way on this road the village of Luri groups itself in the most picturesque way imaginable on a hill-side broken by a deep ravine. Down on the seashore above the little Marina or port is a large convent; a church occupies a projecting brow 200 ft. above it; higher still, and right and left, every vantage-ground is occupied by groups of well-built villas and sepulchral chapels. The slopes are terraced into orchards of citron, lemon, peach and almond trees, olive groves and vineyards, sheltered from the gales of winter by high palisades. ”

“ 'The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. ”

“ And I still believe that the only way to protect minority religious groups from majority groups in this country is to keep the wall of separation between church and state high and impregnable as the First and Fourteenth Amendments provide. ”

“ By the time of the adoption of the Constitution, our history shows that there was a widespread awareness among many Americans of the dangers of a union of Church and State. These people knew, some of them from bitter personal experience, that one of the greatest dangers to the freedom of the individual to worship in his own way lay in the Government's placing its official stamp of approval upon one particular kind of prayer or one particular form of religious services. ”

“ But now that the gambling-tables have brought a flood of gold into the principality, wealth has taken the place of poverty, the palace has been furnished anew, the humble Grimaldi church, 13th cent., thrown down, and in its stead a majestic cathedral erected, the barns have been filled with plenty, costly roads have been cut through the cliffs, the formerly arid hills clothed with exuberant verdure, and beautiful villas have been built in the midst of enchanting gardens, in places where, only a few years ago, hardly enough of short wiry grass could grow to feed a goat. ”

“ To authorize a State to tax its residents for such church purposes is to put the State squarely in the religious activities of certain religious groups that happen to be strong enough politically to write their own religious preferences and prejudices into the laws. This links state and churches together in controlling the lives and destinies of our citizenship-a citizenship composed of people of myriad religious faiths, some of them bitterly hostile to and completely intolerant of the others. ”

“ For this reason, petitioners argue, the State's use of the Regents' prayer in its public school system breaches the constitutional wall of separation between Church and State. We agree with that contention, since we think that the constitutional prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that, in this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government. ”

“ In the same way, there is no form of hat yet devised by human ingenuity that will not tempt forgiveness when it is on the right woman.
And woman herself quite clearly perceives the force of association, the importance, if the significance of the hat is to be preserved and understood, of keeping it on her head. If this were not so why should we be confronted with the monumental paradox that our womankind are keeping their hats on in church and taking them off in places of amusement? At the theatre woman consents to be separated from her hat, and to have her hat separated from her. ”

“ There is even a possibility that some of the children might not be sent to the church schools if the parents were compelled to pay their children's bus fares out of their own pockets when transportation to a public school would have been paid for by the State. ”

“ The other parts of the exterior have a venerable appearance. The buttresses are shallow, and do not reach the eaves. A delicate dentil cornice runs round the building, bending over the round-headed windows and across the buttresses. Within, the church by restoration looks as if it were modern. Tall piers, with attached Corinthian columns and vaulting shafts, run up to the commencement of the arches of the aisles and of the vault of the roof, all of stone. From the semicircular chancel radiate 4 semicircular chapels, one being occupied by the organ. ”

“ Moreover, state-paid policemen, detailed to protect children going to and from church schools from the very real hazards of traffic, would serve much the same purpose and accomplish much the same result as state provisions intended to guarantee free transportation of a kind which the state deems to be best for the school children's welfare. And parents might refuse to risk their children to the serious danger of traffic accidents going to and from parochial schools the approaches to which were not protected by policemen. ”

“ Of course they must remain destitute of public worship and religious instruction, unless they can enjoy these blessings in company with the whites. Now there is hardly a church in the United States, not exclusively appropriated to the blacks, in which one of their number owns a pew, or has a voice in the choice of a minister. There are usually, indeed, a few seats in a remote part of the church, set apart for their use, and in which no white person is ever seen. ”

“ The second reason is that the Church is not only the religious but the social center for the negro, largely taking the place with him, which the secret and benevolent societies hold among the white people. Very few are Roman Catholics. The Roman Church has not made the progress among the negroes, which one would expect of the Church which has such a hold on the common peoples of Southern Europe. Only about four thousand are members of the Presbyterian Church; and to the Episcopal Church belong only 9,000 communicants. ”

“ To persuade others to his own point of view, the pleader, as we know, at times, resorts to exaggeration, to vilification of men who have been, or are, prominent in church or state, and even to false statement. ”

“ In the interior a broad triforium with heavily-canopied window-openings surrounds the church. The vaulting shafts expand in a curious way over the roof. In the chapel of the south transept is a statue of Mary by Coysvox. At the foot of the pier in this transept a trap-door opens into the crypt, 10th cent. At the south side of the Palais des Arts is St. Pierre, a modern edifice, with a beautiful portal of the 11th cent., all that remains of the original church. ”

“ The Porte d’Arroux and the temple of Janus (a plain square tower) are behind the railway station. But the Porte St. André, adjoining an ancient church, is on the town side of the line at the Faubourg St. Jean. The Cathedral, which commands the entire city, was completed in 1178. The architecture of the modern portions is Gothic, but the more ancient is Romanesque. The two towers have been restored and adorned with Gothic spires. The interior contains several windows of painted glass. The entrance is by a handsome open portico with sculptured arches and columns. ”

“ The first, and perhaps the only distinctive institution which the Negro has developed in this country is the Negro church, and it is in connection with his religion that we may expect to find, if anywhere, the indications of a distinctive Afro-American culture. The actual conditions [Pg 119] under which the African slaves were converted to Christianity have never been adequately investigated. We know, in a general way, that there was at first considerable opposition to admitting the Negro into the church because it was feared that it would impair the master's title to his slaves. ”

“ Measured by these standards, we cannot say that the First Amendment prohibits New Jersey from spending tax-raised funds to pay the bus fares of parochial school pupils as a part of a general program under which it pays the fares of pupils attending public and other schools. It is undoubtedly true that children are helped to get to church schools. ”

“ This does not imply that the whites and blacks should be urged or persuaded to unite in all churches or in any church. It may be conceded that the blacks generally do not desire to unite with white churches, and that, in their present state of culture, it may not always be for their edification to do so. But where an individual Negro does believe that it would be for his edification and growth in grace to belong to a white church, shall the color that God stamped on him, or the race in which God gave him his birth, be a sufficient reason {150} for refusing him? ”