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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 40. The Negro Church - 3. The Negro Church and the General American Pattern of Religious Activity
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Chapter 40. The Negro Church 86
s
among the Negroes the small upper class tends, more than the lower classes,
to belong to the Episcopalian, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches.*’
Protestant religion in America has always had relatively more emotionalism
than in other countries: revival meetings and evangelists have played a
greater role, and the regular church services have exhibited more emotional
traits. The South is somewhat extreme in this respect, too, and the Negroes
TABLE I
Negro Membership in Harlem Churches by Denomination: 1930
Denomination Number Per Cent
Baptist 27,948 41
Methodist 13,740 20
Protestant Episcopal 7,151 II
Roman Catholic* 4,990 7
Presbyterian 1,80s 3
Adventist 1,000 2
Congregationalist 9SO I
Moravian and Lutheran 900 I
Other 9,139 14
Total 67,623 iOO
Source: The Greater New York Federation of Churches, The Negro Churches in Manhattan (1930), pp,
17-18.
• Includes 5 churches having both Negro and white parishioners.
Still more so.** As In the white population there is a class differential as well
as a geographical one in regard to degree of emotionalism in religious
service. Upper and middle class Negroes are likely to frown upon the old
practices which still prevail in the lower classes.
States as of January i, 1940. It was estimated that about one-third of them were in
mixed churches. The 1936 Census of Religious Bodies reported only 137,684 Catholics
in Negro churches. (Florence Murray [editor], The Negro Handbook [1942], p. 1025
these figures were taken from John Thomas Gillard, Colored Catholics in the United
States [1941].)
* The geographical distribution of Negro denominations is fairly even, on the whole,
but there are significant exceptions that must be noted. In the South, Negroes have roughly
the same denominational distribution as lower and middle class whites: they are mainly
Baptist or Methodist with a concentration of Roman Catholic in southern Louisiana. In
the North there is a much greater diversity: not only have Negroes gone into the estab-
lished churches dominant in the North—the Episcopalian, Catholic, Presbyterian—^but have
started scores of new sects. Table i shows the distribution of Negro church membership
in the Harlem section of New York City in 1930. Since 1930 we may guess that the
Episcopal, Catholic and “Other” churches—“Other” being predominantly the new Negro
sects but also some of the white-dominated churches such as the Christian Science
Church—have increased their membership, partly at the expense of the Baptist and
Methodist churches. The Father Divine Peace Mission has developed since 1932—mainly
in New York but also in other Northern and Western cities—and it symbolizes the rapid
growth of new Negro sects.
^
See Chapter 43, Section 3,
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