any means a Christian Church, but a mere adaptation of those heathen rites which we roughly
designate by the term Obe Worship or “Voodooism.” Association and missionary effort soon
gave these rites a veneer of Christianity, and
gradually, after two centuries, the Church became
Christian, with a simple Calvinistic creed, but
with many of the old customs still clinging to the
services. It is this historic fact that the Negro
Church today bases itself upon the sole surviving
social institution of the African fatherland, that accounts for its extraordinary growth and vitality.
We easily forget that in the United States today
there is a Church organization for every sixty
Negro families. This institution, therefore,
naturally assumed many functions which the other
harshly suppressed social organs had to surrender; the Church became the center of amusements,
of what little spontaneous economic activity remained, of education, and of all social intercourse, of music and art.[1]
For these reasons the tendency of the Negro worshippers from the very first was to integrate into their own organizations. As early as 1775 distinct Negro congregations with Negro ministers began to appear here and there in the United States. They multiplied, were swept away, effort
- ↑ 3 Atlanta University Publications, The Negro Church, 1903.
