For Carter G. Woodson, the Black church represents Black Americans’ potential to organize and uplift their communities from within. But the Black church also demonstrates how exploitative Black elites, the mis-education system, and white institutions’ influence have combined to prevent that potential from being realized.
Woodson argues that churches are uniquely positioned to drive political, economic, and social organization in Black communities. First, they’re the only institutions that Black people in the 1930s (when Woodson was writing) wholly control, and secondly, they provide a social space for the Black community to physically assemble and coordinate. Unsurprisingly, numerous businesses and political organizations have emerged out of social networks formed at church. Moreover, the church is a model for how the Black community can work together to form institutions. Woodson argues that, by pooling resources at church, the Black community can form and support other institutions (like better schools and Black-owned businesses).
However, in the early 20th century, the church isn’t actually fulfilling its potential. Instead of helping Black people pool their resources, form a self-sustaining economy, and build wealth, Black churches have largely divided and preyed on their constituencies. First, they’ve divided the community by fragmenting into smaller sects and denominations. For instance, Woodson notes that one town is divided between Methodists and Baptists, who refuse to work together and pursue the Black community’s shared political goals. Meanwhile, many churches have fallen into the hands of scam artists and charlatans who try to profit by extracting resources from the community, rather than channeling resources into it. Thus, the church simultaneously represents Black communities’ potential to achieve self-sufficiency and their failure to do so.
The Black Church Quotes in The Mis-Education of the Negro
Some one recently inquired as to why the religious schools do not teach the people how to tolerate differences of opinion and to cooperate for the common good. This, however, is the thing which these institutions have refused to do. Religious schools have been established, but they are considered necessary to supply workers for denominational outposts and to keep alive the sectarian bias by which the Baptists hope to outstrip the Methodists or the latter the former. No teacher in one of these schools has advanced a single thought which has become a working principle in Christendom, and not one of these centres is worthy of the name of a school of theology.
This minister had given no attention to the religious background of the Negroes to whom he was trying to preach. He knew nothing of their spiritual endowment and their religious experience as influenced by their traditions and environment in which the religion of the Negro has developed and expressed itself. He did not seem to know anything about their present situation. These honest people, therefore, knew nothing additional when he had finished his discourse. As one communicant pointed out, their wants had not been supplied, and they wondered where they might go to hear a word which had some bearing upon the life which they had to live.
The Black Church Symbol Timeline in The Mis-Education of the Negro
