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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 40. The Negro Church - 5. Its Weakness - 6. Trends and Outlook
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876 An American Dilemma
brightest and most ambitious young Negroes.® The development under way
will take a long time to manifest its complete effects. But it goes on and will
spell the further decline of the Negro church as an active influence in the
Negro community, if it does not begin to reform itself radically.
6. Trends and Outlook
The Negro church has been lagging ideologically, too. While for a long
time the protest has been rising in the Negro community, the church has,
on the whole, remained conservative and accommodating. Its traditions
from slavery help to explain this. Its other-worldly outlook is itself an
expression of political fatalism. In a city in the Deep South with a Negro
population of 43,000 (Savannah), there are ninety Negro churches, one
hundred active preachers and another hundred “jack legs”j here where the
Negro ministry with few exceptions had been discouraging a recent move-
ment to get the Negroes registered for voting, a Negro preacher explained:
All we preachers is supposed to do is to preach the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
and Him Crucified, and that’s all.**
In most Negro communities visited by the present writer the progressive
Negro leaders, trying to organize the Negro community for defense, com-
plained about the timidity and disinterest on the part of the preachers.
“They talk too much about heaven and too little about down here.”
Regularly the explanation was given that the churches were mortgaged to
influential white people and that the preacher got small handouts from
employers and politicians. Without doubt the preachers old position of
the white man’s trusted Negro “leader” secures small advantages not only
to himself but also to his group—and according to the scheme we analyzed
* In the last decade or so, there have been summer institutes established for Negro
ministers—such as the one sponsored by the white Southern Methodist Episcopal Church
—
but relatively few Negroes participate, and even the education thus offered is completely
inadequate for lack of time and money.
**
Ralph J. Bunche, “A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership,” unpublished
manuscript prepared for this study (1940), pp. 79-80.
Sterner and I once attended a Sunday evening service in a Negro Baptist church in one
of the capitals of the Upper South. The preacher developed the theme that nothing in
this world was of any great importance: real estate, automobiles, fine clothes, learnedness,
prestige, money, all this is nothing. It is not worth striving for. But an humble, peaceful
heart will be remunerated in heaven. After the service we went up to the preacher for a
talk. We asked him if he should not instead try to instil more worldly ambition in his
poor and disadvantaged group. The preacher began to explain to us, as foreigners, that
this would not do at all in the South. The role of the Negro church, he told us, was to
make the poor Negroes satisfied with their lowly status. He finished by exclaiming: “We
are the policemen of the Negroes. If we did not keep down their ambitions and divert them
into religion, there would be upheaval in the South.” This preacher is not typical in his
philosophy of extreme accommodation or in his intellectual clarity. But it is significant
that he exists.
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