Today, although its influence has decreased, the church is still a pivotal institution within black communities. Many black preachers continue to deliver moral messages from their pulpits. They emphasize the need to save money for the future, to acquire an education, and to work and support the family as well as raise the children to be respectful and industrious. Owing to its devastating impact on the family, adultery and divorce are regarded as twin evils, and some churches offer counseling services for couples. As noted earlier, such vices as drinking, gambling, prostitution, smoking, dancing, and stealing are frowned upon. Church parishioners continue to visit jails and prisons in efforts to persuade those who have gone astray to straighten out their lives.92
THE BLACK CHURCH AND ITS IMPACT ON POLITICS
As expected, many black churches in the South were popular sites for organized political activity among freedmen and their Northern supporters. For example, in Louisville, Quinn Chapel AME Church hosted the states’ black teachers’ convention in 1870. Quinn Chapel was also the scene of meetings protesting the absence of impartiality for blacks in Kentucky courts, and prominent roles in the city’s streetcar segregation demonstrations of 1870 were played by several of its members. Moreover, under the supervision of the Reverend J. C. Waters, Asbury Chapel, also located in Louisville, hosted numerous protest rallies.93 And throughout the early years of freedom, blacks held mass political meetings at Zion Presbyterian Church and Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, both of which could seat between 1,500 and 2,000 people. These gatherings were held to discuss the state and welfare of the country in general and the condition of newly freed slaves in particular. Committees were organized to devise strategies to deal with the changed conditions wrought by the war.94
Clergymen were among the most effective and able black politicians during the Reconstruction period. Black ministers from both the North and South, experienced in the politics of the church arena and used to exerting influence in the black community, successfully won election to legislative seats and took an active part in government at the Federal, state, and local levels. To fully understand the disproportionate representation of the clergy among the political leaders, one need only to look at South Carolina. Of the 255 blacks who served in the state legislature between 1868 and 1876, forty-three were ministers.95 Among some of the best-known minister-politicians of the Reconstruction era were Bishop Henry M. Turner, Bishop James W. Hood, Holland Thompson, R. H. Cain, and Mansfield Tyler. The careers of Turner and Hood are representative. Bishop Turner of the AME Church, plunging with tremendous energy into recruiting blacks into the Republican Party, became active in Georgia politics after the war. He was eventually elected to the state legislature but later lost his seat when racist Georgians resumed control. Bishop Hood of the AME Zion Church presided over what may have been the first convention called by blacks after they gained their freedom. He then served as a local magistrate, a deputy collector for the Internal Revenue, and assistant superintendent of public instruction of the state of North Carolina. Interestingly, only two of the twenty blacks elected to the U.S. House of Representatives were ministers, but one of the two blacks elected to the Senate, Hiram Revels of Mississippi, was a preacher.96 Furthermore, the vast majority of those ministers who were active in politics were Republicans and shared on the whole the conservative political philosophy of the party. In other words, they did not try to upset the existing order. While they did support political and civil rights for blacks, they refused to support the land reform proposals that would have made it easier for freedmen to acquire land and thus build a foundation for economic independence. Black minister-politicians also opposed unionization. If freedmen could not own or rent land, they had to work as sharecroppers or wage earners, and in those positions they wanted fair wages and decent working conditions. One way to accomplish these goals was through unionization, but on this issue most minister-politicians again followed the conservative party line.97
JAMES WALKER HOOD, AN INFLUENTIAL BISHOP IN THE AME ZION CHURCH WHO BECAME ACTIVE IN NORTH CAROLINA POLITICS DURING RECONSTRUCTION.
Courtesy of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History
Despite their shortcomings, however, minister-politicians as well as the preachers who did not enter politics made a significant contribution to the black community. They helped promote the ideas of racial solidarity and self-help. Under their guidance, the churches provided religious services and functioned as a social, economic, and political institution within the black community. That black ministers accomplished so much under such difficult circumstances is one of the most remarkable triumphs of the post-Civil War period.
WOMEN STRUGGLE TO GAIN ACCEPTANCE INTO THE MINISTRY
One of the darkest chapters in black church history has been the discrimination against female members by males. Apparently, although the practices of injustice that they heaped upon women paralleled those that had led them to rebel against white churches, men could not see the error of their ways. How did this situation come about? In the process of institutionalizing clandestine religious practices formed during slavery and separating them from white congregations, freed people reserved church leadership positions for men. In fact, women were turned out of the sanctuary “before the men began to talk” about matters of church policy. Perceptive whites on the Sea Islands reported the public censure of freedwomen there who had showed a lack of proper respect for their husbands’ authority. Since the reputation of husbands was tied to wives, it was thought that a woman should not engage in actions that would embarrass or humiliate her spouse. To do only as he desired was reinforced by biblical interpretation. In fact, the biblical injunction, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands,” gave preachers the justification for church-based decisions that seemed arbitrary or unfair to the women involved.98 The fact that black women had such crucial roles in establishing and ensuring the success of the churches makes the subordinate status assigned to them by men all the more despicable.
Black men, of course, especially regarded the ministry as their domain, and throughout the postwar period they steadfastly resisted the efforts of women to become ordained. For example, as one scholar has noted, “rather than concede the full authority of ordination, the A.M.E. chose to accommodate its organizational arrangements to include positions specifically designed for women—namely, stewardess and deaconess—and under duress would approve the licensing of women as evangelists.” However, even before these minimal victories were won, the struggle of black women preachers desirous of becoming ordained by the AME Church would be long and arduous. And despite the structural inclusion of women and their intensive labors for the church, at the conclusion of the nineteenth century, their role had not markedly changed. They were barred from official leadership positions and kept subservient. At the 1844,1848, and 1864 AME General Conferences, petitions requesting that women be allowed to preach were presented and turned down. But by 1868 the AME Church decided to institute an alternative to ordination: women preachers could now become stewardesses. Perhaps the church made this concession out of concern for the steadily increasing number of women who were publicly preaching.99
After 1868 the preaching of AME women openly escalated, although it would be three decades later before the church would again open its hierarchy to women. While the church never turned down prospective female members, it certainly accepted their money and never declined the material support produced by women’s benevolent societies. Yet, women were only supposed to be seen, not heard. However, some were being heard, and the response was positive. Amanda Berry Smith, for example, the best known of the AME preaching women, was as early as 1871 credited with having markedly increased the membership of the waning congregation of Mount Pisqah in Salem, New Jersey, during a three-week stay there. Commenting on her work in the Christian Recorder, Elder Frisby Cooper wrote that she is “a very useful helper in the vineyard of the Lord, God bless her ever.”100 Elder Cooper’s assessment of Smith’s ability to save souls
was echoed even by some bishops at the 1872 General Conference of the AME Church. After hearing her sing at a session held at Fisk University, they were convinced that Smith was blessed with the spirit of God. As a result, she received several invitations to preach at churches but no appointment as pastor or the rite of ordination.
Given the response of some of the AME brethren to Smith’s inquiry into the cost of going to Nashville to attend the General Conference of 1872, the remarks made by bishops concerning her being “of the spirit” appear hypocritical at best. One of the AME brethren wrote back to Smith, “I tell you, Sister, it will cost money to go down there; and if you aint got plenty of it, it’s no use to go.” Another asked, “What does she want to go for?” “Woman preacher; they want to be ordained” was the reply. Another wrote, “I mean to fight that thing,” and yet another said, “Yes, indeed, so will 1.”101 These statements illustrate the staunch opposition faced by black women preachers in their efforts to become ordained ministers. Yet, they did not despair. They continued to fight on. In this struggle, Smith was joined by other prominent AME black women such as Margaret Wilson, Emily Calkins Stevens, Lena Doolin-Mason, and Charlotte S. Riley.102 Although these women sought ordination by the AME Church without success, women striving for ordination in other black denominations such as the AME Zion Church, CME Church, or Baptists did not fare any better. The black church as an institution was male dominated, and there was great resistance to change.103
CHAPTER EIGHT
“WE INTEND TO HAVE OUR RIGHTS”
Political and Social Activists
in Post-Civil War America
IN THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT of March 2, 1867, Congress unfolded its design for establishing loyal governments in the South. The former Confederate states, except Tennessee, were to be divided into five military districts administered by a major general who would be charged with the task of preparing his district for readmission to the Union. The process of readmission entailed a series of steps. Loyal voters, defined as all citizens excluding former Confederate leaders, were to be registered. They would then elect delegates to a state constitutional convention. When the new constitution had been approved by the voters and by Congress, the state would have to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. And only after the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified by three-quarters of the states and added to the Constitution could the former Confederate states send representatives and senators to the U.S. Congress. A key component of the Reconstruction Act was its requirement that blacks be given the vote, which meant that the electorate who chose delegates to the state constitutional conventions had to include blacks. Furthermore, the new state constitutions were required to codify the same rule of suffrage for the black man. Thus, the former slaves were assured of the right to take part in the reconstructed governments of the Southern states.
Under the new state constitutions, blacks were elected to public office in all Southern states, but although they held some political power and had influence, they were never in complete control. Even in states such as South Carolina, where they constituted a majority of the population, black legislators were still disproportionately underrepresented. Whites always had the majority in the state senate, and a white man always occupied the governor’s mansion. But, out of a total of 127 members in the first legislature, eighty-seven were blacks. Two blacks served as lieutenant governor in South Carolina, Alonzo J. Ransier in 1870 and Richard Gleaves in 1872. And two blacks served as speaker of the house there, Samuel J. Lee in 1872 and Robert B. Elliott in 1874. Prominent educator Francis Cardozo was secretary of state from 1868 to 1872 and state treasurer from 1872 to 1876.
In Louisiana there were 133 black members of the legislature, made up of thirty-eight senators and ninety-five representatives, between 1868 and 1896. Most of them in office between 1868 and 1877 were veterans of the Union army and free men of color before the war. Some, however, were former slaves, including John W. Menard, who was elected to Congress but denied a seat. Three blacks, and also former slaves—Oscar Dunn, P. B. S. Pinchback, and C. C. Antonine—held the position of lieutenant governor in Louisiana. Pinchback even served as acting governor of the state for forty-three days in 1873 when Governor Henry C. Warmoth was impeached. Pinchback was the only black to serve in that capacity until Douglas Wilder was elected governor of Virginia in 1990.
P. B. S. PINCHBACK, LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR AND GOVERNOR OF LOUISIANA.
Library of Congress
From 1869 to 1901, twenty-two blacks were active in national politics: two in the U.S. Senate and twenty in the U.S. House of Representatives. The two senators, Hiram Revels, born free in North Carolina, and Blanch K. Bruce, born a slave in Virginia, were elected from Mississippi. Bruce, who was elected in 1874, was the only black who served a full term in the Senate until the election of Edward Brooke from Massachusetts in 1966. The first of the twenty blacks to serve in the House were seated in 1869; eight were from South Carolina, four from North Carolina, three from Alabama, and one each from Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia. Two from South Carolina, Joseph H. Rainey and Robert Smalls, each served five consecutive terms, and J. T. Walls of Florida and John R. Lynch of Mississippi each served three terms. Like most other congressmen, many of these men had been in politics at the state level before being elected to the House. Of the twenty-two blacks who served in Congress between 1869 and 1900, ten were members of the old free black elite.
Nevertheless, at both the state and national level, the majority of the black politicians during Reconstruction had been slaves. From among this group the most influential had lived as slaves in cities, working as clerks, carpenters, blacksmiths, or waiters in hotels and boarding houses. A few had been the privileged body servants of aristocratic and powerful whites. Robert Smalls of South Carolina, for example, became the most influential and successful Reconstruction politician in the state, and Louisiana’s Oscar Dunn and P. B. S. Pinchback had illustrious political careers.1
HIRAM REVELS, U.S. SENATOR FROM MISSISSIPPI.
Library of Congress
While most black politicians held political bases in the South, at least one, George Washington Williams, served in the Ohio House of Representatives; others sat in both the Massachusetts and Illinois state legislatures. Some held various Federal and state positions, such as former Union army lieutenant James M. Trotter, who was appointed to the lucrative post of recorder of deeds in Washington, DC. Since less than 2 percent of the black population lived in the North, however, their influence was considerably less than that of their Southern counterparts.2
Most black politicians supported civil and political rights, public education, jury reform, voting rights, and the expansion of social services, but, like the black minister-politicians, they refused to press for the kind of real economic reform that would allow unionization and give freedmen the land that they needed to build a secure economic foundation. On the issues of land reform and unionization, black politicians let down their constituencies. Far too many of the black politicians, like their white Republican allies, had narrow class-based interests supported by their own wealth. As landowners, they believed in the sanctity of private property and could not bring themselves to support the confiscation of planters’ land for redistribution to freedmen. Furthermore, those among them who were employers were reluctant to support unionization, and some of them had even owned slaves. In truth, their activities in Congress—fighting, for example, for such local issues as river and harbor legislation—did not differ substantially from those of white congressmen.3
Robert C. DeLarge, state representative and congressman from South Carolina.
Library of Congress
On the whole, however, black officeholders were able and conscientious public servants. Extensive studies of states such as Mississippi reveal that even at the local level, where politicians tended to be ill prepared, there was little difference in the degree of competence and integrity displayed by white and black officeholders. T. W. Cardozo, the
black superintendent of education in Mississippi, was convicted of embezzling funds that had been allotted to Tougaloo College, but other black politicians, such as Dunn and Lynch, had impeccable reputations.4 Furthermore, any political corruption in the decade after the Civil War, at every level of government and in every section of the country, must be seen in perspective. The big thieves were nearly always white; blacks got mostly crumbs.5
Climbing Up to Glory Page 28