Black Church

By: Thomas E. Carney

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Black Church

By the end of the nineteenth century African Americans had cut a wide swath across the American religious spectrum. Indeed, African American churches had become a major part of the mainline American Christian tradition and continued to expand their presence throughout the twentieth century. As a result of demographic changes in the African American population, their churches became part of the geographical landscape throughout the United States. Challenged by the rise of new theological and social issues, African American churches and their leadership became major forces in the political, religious, and social history of the country.

Mainline Christian African American Churches.

An endemic problem for voluntary organizations—and the Baptist conventions are voluntary organizations—is instability. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the black Baptists went through several conventions, and the problem of instability continued into the twentieth century. By the 1880s two denominations had the greatest numbers of African Americans: the Baptists and the Methodists. In 1895 the African American Baptists formed the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. (NBC-USA), through the merger of the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States and the American National Baptist Convention. The rise of the NBC-USA coincided with the enactment of Jim Crow laws throughout the south and with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that made segregation the law of the land. Under the leadership of the Reverend E. C. Morris, the first president of the convention, the NBC-USA became an advocate for its black members in the area of education by supporting numerous primary and secondary schools, as well as colleges. In 1909 it formally adopted the self-help policy advocated by Booker T. Washington. It also supported the newly established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and began to campaign for African Americans' right to vote and serve on juries.

In 1952, with the election of the Reverend J. H. Jackson as president of the convention, the NBC-USA took on a conservative policy that rejected the philosophy of civil disobedience and nonviolent opposition to segregation—the philosophy advocated by emerging civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. This policy was not reversed until the election of the Reverend Dr. Theodore J. Jemison as president of the convention in 1982. Jemison acted immediately to reconfirm the convention's earlier role as an advocate for black Americans’ rights by initiating a nationwide voter registration program.

Despite its inconsistent commitment to the rights of blacks, the NBC-USA has grown. In 1915 the convention reported a membership of approximately 3 million in more than 20,000 affiliated churches. By 1989 membership had soared to nearly 7.5 million in 30,000 affiliated churches, making the NBC-USA the largest single black religious denomination in the United States.

In 1897 a faction within the NBC-USA broke away to establish the Lott Carey Foreign Missionary Convention. The separation was the result of the appointment of new leaders in the convention who moved the headquarters of the Foreign Mission Board from Richmond, Virginia, to Louisville, Kentucky. The new leaders also established a new publishing policy that some longtime members viewed as undercutting their relationships with white Baptists. The seceding group was composed of representatives from the mid-Atlantic states who were better educated and more socially accomplished than other members. In 1905 the NBC-USA and the Lott Carey Convention were able to reconcile some of their differences, but the two groups continue to operate separately, although many officers and members belong to both groups. In the twentieth century the splits continued. Another group, under the leadership of the Reverend R. H. Boyd, who had served as the secretary of the publishing board of the NBC-USA, broke away in 1915 and took the name of National Baptist Convention of America (NBCA). The split was the result of a conflict that arose between Boyd and the Reverend E. C. Morris, who served as president of the NBC-USA from 1895 to 1923. The conflict, over control of the publishing board, raged from 1905 until 1915, when Boyd won out in a civil lawsuit. The National Baptist Publishing Board became the foundation for the NBCA. The primary work of the NBCA has been in publishing, but it has also worked hard in the same areas as the NBC-USA, such as education. It also has a long, continuing commitment to civil rights—for example it supported an early antilynching program—and urban issues. The first president of the NBCA was the Reverend E. P. Jones. By 1989 the group had grown to 2.4 million members.

The issue of control of the National Baptist Publishing Board has been a source of continuing conflict. The Boyd family maintained control of these operations from 1905 until 1988, when they and their supporters broke with the NBCA to form the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America.

The Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC), also known as the Progressive Baptist Alliance, broke from the NBC-USA as a result of the efforts of the Reverend J. H. Jackson to maintain his control over the convention. The dispute began in 1960 and culminated in 1961 with the removal of Martin Luther King Sr., Martin Luther King Jr., and others from their respective offices in the NBC-USA. The new convention was formally established at a meeting at the Zion Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, under the leadership of the Reverend L. Venchael Booth, who served as the chairman of the Volunteer Committee for the Formation of a New National Baptist Convention. The following year, the Reverend T. M. Chambers was elected the first president of the fledgling convention. Reflecting the character of its founding members, the PNBC immediately acted to support the civil rights efforts of the 1960s (including the Black Power movement) and was one of the earliest groups to oppose, formally and vehemently, the Vietnam War. By 1970 several white Baptist churches had formed dual associations with the PNBC; conversely, some PNBC congregations have established memberships in white Baptist conventions. The PNBC remains the smallest of the three black Baptist conventions.

African Americans are also spread across the spectrum of Methodist denominations in the United States. The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), established in 1816, had 450,000 members by 1896. Its growth in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century occurred primarily in America in the north and west, and overseas in Africa and the Caribbean. This denomination has, since its origin, been committed to social action that focuses on the poor and underprivileged.

African American Churches on the Edge.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the African American church was greatly affected by two external forces. The first was the impact of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements upon African Americans. The founder and earliest exponent of Holiness thought was a Methodist woman, Phoebe Worrell Palmer, who lived in New York City. In 1835 she began holding a weekly “Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness.” She focused on the Holy Spirit as the font of enlightenment and power. Her efforts resulted initially in the Church of the Nazarene and later in the development of a similar school of thought called Pentecostalism, which by 1990 was the fastest-growing segment of American Christianity. Palmer's thoughts took on an institutional form in the 1880s when members of the Methodist church established the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness. Other Holiness groups developed within the Methodist and Baptist churches.

African Methodist Episcopal Church. Women attend a Youth League event outside the First AME Church, 1918.

Shades of L.A. Archives/Los Angeles Public Library

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By the 1890s, however, many blacks and whites within the Holiness movement withdrew from the Methodist and Baptist churches. In 1906 many adherents of Holiness thought were attracted to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, California. William J. Seymour, a black Holiness preacher, established the revival, formally known as the Apostolic Faith Gospel Movement. Seymour had studied under Charles F. Parnham, the founder of the Pentecostal movement. Like Parnham, Seymour taught that true conversion was followed by a “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” which in turn led to perfect holiness. Services at the revival were marked by speaking in tongues and the healing of the sick. The movement itself was marked by true egalitarianism: women and men preached, and the congregation welcomed whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

A disciple of Seymour's, Charles H. Mason, returned to his home in Memphis and, along with Charles Jones, established a church called the Church of God in Christ. The two differed over dogma, however—Jones rejected the notion of speaking in tongues—and the church split. Mason and his followers continued under the name of the Church of God in Christ, and eventually became the largest black Pentecostal denomination. Jones established the Church of Christ (Holiness). These churches have been disparagingly referred to as “holy rollers” because of the emotional nature of the church service, which supposedly causes fervent worshippers to roll on the floor and which incorporates the use of such secular musical instruments as the guitar, piano, and drums into a style of music that has become known as black gospel music.

The second twentieth-century force that affected the African American church was the Great Migration, a massive movement—beginning in the early twentieth century—of African Americans out of the South and into the West and (primarily) the North. At its peak, between 1940 and 1970, 4.4 million blacks left their homes in the South in search of opportunities in the industrially developing cities of the North. Many of these itinerant blacks found their new environs unfriendly and uncomfortable. In particular many missed the warmth and support of their churches, but they lacked the funds to build new churches in the crowded cities that they now inhabited. As a result, black churches came to occupy vacant storefronts and warehouses, such as the Azusa Street Mission. The African American search for religious solace in the cities also gave rise to cults that were founded upon the personalities of single individuals. Such was the Universal Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine, a movement that dominated the African American religious experience during the first half of the twentieth century. It was founded by Father Major Jealous Divine, who was born George Baker in Georgia around 1880. Father Divine's community began quietly in the 1920s, when he provided housing for a number of his black followers. As the number of those followers grew, they came to include both blacks and whites. The movement came to prominence in the early 1930s when Father Divine was arrested for disturbing the peace. Only days after he sentenced Father Divine to jail, the judge, who had previously been in robust health, died, and Father Divine claimed responsibility. Soon after Divine and his followers moved to Harlem.

Father Divine's movement was a hodgepodge of religious traditions. His premise was that all men are equal before God and therefore have the same rights: the rights to life, liberty, and happiness. Father Divine had a clear International Modesty Code that prohibited tobacco, alcohol, and contact between the sexes. Even married couples who were members of the movement were required to live apart.

Unlike other cultlike religious organizations, none of the Peace Mission's assets were titled in Father Divine's name; rather, each group of believers incorporated their church and affiliated it with Father Divine's movement. The movement experienced its greatest growth during Father Divine's lifetime. After his death in 1965, the Peace Mission maintained churches in Philadelphia, the Bronx, Newark, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

Similar to Father Divine's Universal Peace Mission, the United House of Prayer for All People was established by Charles Manuel Grace. “Sweet Daddy,” as his followers called him, was born in the Cape Verde Islands and moved to Massachusetts, where he worked as a railroad short-order cook, a salesman, and a grocer. In 1919 he established his first United House of Prayer in Wareham, Massachusetts. Subsequently other churches were founded in Charlotte, North Carolina, in Washington, D.C., and in other locations along the east coast of the United States. The church followed the Pentecostal tradition, emphasizing sanctification, purification through a holy life, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. The church drew its membership primarily from the economically depressed ghettos of the growing cities.

Following the African American tradition, the ceremonies of the United House of Prayer were marked by song, dance, and hand clapping, with the Pentecostal touch of speaking in tongues. Unlike other African American churches, however, Sweet Daddy's House of Prayer had no social programs or agenda. The church did carry on an extensive business in a number of products, including soap, toothpaste, and cookies—all of which were marketed under the name “Daddy Grace.” The church and its founder suffered a major collapse in 1970 when the Internal Revenue Service seized most of Grace's properties to pay an alleged $5,966,000 in back taxes.

Growth of an Alternate Religious Tradition.

In the twentieth century the black church became the initial arena for the pursuit of African American identity, independence, equality, and complete freedom. The best-known experiment in this respect was carried out by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a native of Jamaica who organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914. The purpose of the organization was to bring all people of African descent together. Greatly impressed by the work of Booker T. Washington to educate and train blacks in the United States, Garvey came to the United States in 1916 to convince Washington to train blacks to become missionaries in Africa. But these missionaries would not try to save souls or convert the Africans to Christian religions; rather, Garvey envisioned that they would provide technical training to the Africans. Unfortunately Washington had died by the time Garvey arrived. Garvey thereupon decided to remain and establish branches of his organization in the United States. The movement was popular with the black communities and quickly caught on.

Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace, c. 1930. Photograph by Addison Scurlock.

Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

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The religious tradition of the UNIA borrowed heavily from the Catholic Church. It characterized Jesus Christ as the “Black Savior” and the Virgin Mary as the “Black Madonna.” Many within the black communities flocked to Garvey's “Liberty Halls,” where they proclaimed their belief “in God, the Creator, … Jesus Christ, His Son,” and “Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Negro peoples of the world.”

The success of Garvey's message of African unity tied to religion upset many in both the black and white communities. Partially as a result of an FBI investigation, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to prison. In 1927, having served two years, he was deported. The loss of Garvey's presence and leadership resulted in the collapse of UNIA; however, his ideas of Pan-Africanism tied to religion would survive.

The search for freedom and equality was not limited to a Christian context. Almost since the arrival of the first African slaves in Jamestown, African Americans had metaphorically compared themselves to the Old Testament Jews. In 1896 William S. Crowdy, a black man from Lawrence, Kansas, began to preach a new version of Judaism in which he argued that blacks were part of the lost tribes of Israel. To advance his beliefs, he founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ. This merger of Jewish and black identity was repeated in the 1920s when Wentworth A. Matthew brought together a congregation of black Jews in Harlem known as the Commandment Keepers Congregation of the Living God. Matthew rejected the emotionally charged Christianity of the African American churches in favor of strict discipline and morality that would enhance the image of African Americans. Crowdy's and Matthew's breaks with Christianity would not be the only such deviations in the twentieth century.

At about the same time that Crowdy and Matthew were preaching a convergence of blacks and Judaism, Timothy Drew, a black railroad worker from North Carolina, was changing his name to Noble Drew Ali. In 1913 he established the first Moorish Science Temple in Newark, New Jersey. He published the beliefs of his church in a sixty-page pamphlet entitled “The Holy Koran,” which should not be confused with the Qu'ran of orthodox Islam because there is no similarity in the doctrines set out in the two. Drew built his belief system on recent black history. He argued that just as Saint John the Baptist had been the herald for Jesus Christ, so Marcus Garvey was the herald of Noble Drew Ali. Noble Drew established the headquarters of the Moorish Science Temple in Chicago and established other temples in several cities. After his death in 1929 the efforts of his followers were stymied by the rise of a second black church founded upon the Muslim tradition—the Nation of Islam.

Little is known about the life of Wallace D. Fard before his appearance as an itinerant peddler in Detroit in 1930. Fard preached to his customers that blacks were part of the “lost-found tribe of Shabazz” and that salvation depended upon the development of “knowledge of self.” To provide a foundation for his Nation of Islam, he developed a creation story: in the beginning all men were created black, but an evil “Dr. Yakub” created a race of white devils whom he was unable to control. The white devils multiplied and took control of the world, which Allah permitted, but at the end of the allotted time—at the end of the world—the Nation of Islam would return to its proper place as ruler. For this reason, rather than seeking integration, which was the goal of many during the years of Jim Crow, blacks must separate themselves from the white race and prepare for the new age, during which the Nation of Islam would prevail. In 1934 Fard was arrested for disturbing the peace and ordered by the police to leave Detroit. By this time he had established two congregations, one in Detroit and one in Chicago, and several educational programs. He left his church in the hands of Elijah Poole, whom he renamed Elijah Muhammad. Fard then simply disappeared. Some believe that he was murdered.

Elijah Muhammad taught that Fard was the incarnation of Allah and that he had returned to Heaven to prepare for the end of the world. Muhammad also argued that he was the messenger of Fard/Allah. Under his leadership, which lasted until 1975, the Nation of Islam experienced substantial growth. By 1960 its membership exceeded 100,000. Much of this growth was the result of the work of Malcolm X, formerly known as Malcolm Little. Malcolm was the son of a Baptist minister who had been a supporter of Marcus Garvey. He grew up always on the edge of trouble, and by 1950 he was in prison. There he began to read the writings of Elijah Muhammad and became a fervent convert to the Nation of Islam. Upon his release, he formally joined the Nation of Islam and began to work tirelessly to spread its word and increase its membership. He was a staunch critic of those blacks who had accepted Christianity—“the white man's religion.” He dedicated himself to the tenets of Islam as he understood them, which included strict discipline and dietary regulations. He also helped to establish a number of remarkably successful rehabilitation programs within the Nation of Islam to address the needs of those who had been released from prison, drug addicts, and alcoholics. The turning point for Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Nation of Islam occurred with a falling out between Muhammad and Malcolm after Malcolm returned from his hajj. While on the hajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca that is required of all able orthodox Muslims—Malcolm was shocked to find that Islam attracted and included followers from all races, including whites. For him this revelation struck at the very foundations of the Nation of Islam. Upon his return to the United States he broke with the Nation of Islam and established his own church, The Muslim Mosque, Inc., and proclaimed a message of Pan-Africanism. He became a confirmed and active critic of the Nation of Islam, which was the reason that he was assassinated in 1964.

The apparent successor to Elijah Muhammad as the leader of the Nation of Islam was his son, Warith Deen Muhammad. Warith however had been estranged from his father for some time. The estrangement was possibly the result of Warith's personal experiences with Islam, for he had learned Arabic, visited Mecca, and become a serious student of orthodox Islam. Prior to Muhammad's death in 1975 he and Warith reconciled, and upon Muhammad's death Warith assumed the leadership of the Nation of Islam. In 1985 Warith attempted to disband the Nation of Islam and led most of its followers into orthodox Islam. A small number of the followers of the Nation of Islam, led by Minister Louis Farrakhan, retained the name and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. Despite the efforts of Farrakhan, including the One Million Man March of October 1995, it is estimated that membership in the Nation of Islam is only about 20,000 nationally. Warith's decision to lead the Nation of Islam into orthodox Islam hints at an important context that is seldom discussed. There had been since the 1920s a moderate-sized orthodox Muslim community in the United States, and it grew steadily: by the late 1990s it was estimated at 5 million people, with approximately 2 million of those being African Americans. This movement is marked by racial equality and inclusiveness. It also represents a serious movement away from what is perceived of as the Christian-centeredness of African American society.

The Black Church and the Civil Rights Movement.

The greatest battle for the African American churches in the twentieth century was for racial equality and freedom. The Civil War and its accompanying Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments ended the formal institution of slavery and professed to offer blacks freedom, but the reality of life was much different. Soon after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, most southern states rushed to enact Jim Crow laws that in a real sense reestablished slavery. Blacks were banned from white restaurants, places of entertainment, and public accommodation. They were required to ride segregated streetcars and, later, buses, and were required to use only specified water fountains and bathrooms. Any attempt by blacks to exercise their rights to vote or sit on juries was met with harassment and often death. Such treatment made freedom only a word and, in a practical sense, condemned most blacks to a life of poverty. The overwhelming nature of this problem—the condemnation of an entire people to the status of second-class citizenry—became a social issue that the African American churches in the twentieth century could not avoid. But not all decided to address it in the same way.

In 1909 a biracial group that included the great W. E. B. Du Bois established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This was a direct response to Jim Crow. Many African American churches, including the AME, the AME Zion, and the Baptists, responded to this effort by supporting both the NAACP and the newly formed National Urban League. They also established their own programs to foster the education and the development of skills among their black members.

The role of black churches in the lives of their members reached its pinnacle in the late 1950s. Some historians have marked this period as the transition from the Negro church to the black church, and the person most responsible for this transition was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., for it was he who made the church aware of its power to effect social change. King became pastor of the Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. He helped establish the Montgomery Improvement Association, which supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956. This action marked the beginning of the aggressive involvement of the black churches in the fledgling civil rights movement. Much has been made of King's adoption—and the black church's endorsement—of Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. In truth King's philosophy is better understood as the merger of religion and resistance, as a philosophy of challenge and religious fervor in which the proponents of civil rights challenged the Jim Crow establishment while singing black spirituals whose roots often reached back to the slave cultures of the pre–Civil War period.

In 1957 more than sixty black ministers met at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, to set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); they elected Martin Luther King Jr. to be their first president. But these actions were not well received in all black churches. Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, the much-revered and longtime president of the National Baptist Convention, was critical of his younger brothers and their actions. He sought to steer the convention into a nonconfrontational posture that would be acceptable to white-dominated denominations. As a result the more liberal and often younger members of the convention, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and his father Martin Luther King Sr., left the NBC to form the Progressive Baptist Alliance. This period was marked by the rise of a new black clergy who would lead the black church into the twenty-first century, such as Ralph Abernathy, who would succeed King as president of the SCLC, and Wyatt Walker, who was the executive director of SCLC from 1960 to 1964.

Jefferson Baptist Church Congregation. Putnam County, Georgia, 1941. Photograph by Irving Rusinow.

Department of Agriculture, National Archives and Records Administration

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Of particular importance is Leon H. Sullivan. Sullivan was born in West Virginia and served as an assistant pastor under the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. Eventually he became pastor of the poor Zion Baptist Church in northern Philadelphia. Sullivan helped establish the Philadelphia Four Hundred, a group of black ministers who promoted “selected patronage” to force the end of segregation and aid in the employment of blacks. Under this program, ministers would advise their congregations not to buy at those businesses that refused or failed to employ blacks. Later Sullivan founded the Opportunity Industrialization Centers in Philadelphia and other cities. The purpose of the centers was to educate and train blacks so they would be prepared to work in new jobs as the jobs became available. Sullivan subsequently took his battle for equal employment and rights for blacks to the international stage. He joined the board of directors of General Motors in 1971, becoming the first black to sit on the board of a major American corporation. From this position he championed the cause of freeing Nelson Mandela and ending apartheid in South Africa.

The presence of black churches in the civil rights movement was not limited to the South. In 1966 black clergy from such white-dominated denominations as the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Congregationalist churches met in New York City to form the National Council of Black Churchmen. The group issued a statement, entitled “Black Power,” in the same year. Because this statement coincided with similar rhetoric by the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, it unsettled many white and black clergy. The statement however was nothing more than a call for Christian justice and equality for blacks.

The assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 had a serious impact on the black church's role in the civil rights movement, principally because it deprived both the church and the movement of King's leadership. King's death did not end the church's involvement, however: individuals, such as the Reverend Leon Sullivan, and congregations, such as the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, continued and continue to play an active role in advancing and protecting the rights and interests of African Americans.

The Black Church and the Black Community at the End of the Millennium.

By the 1980s the black church had arrived at a destiny driven by two major elements in its history. The liberation tradition that originated almost two centuries earlier with Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser had continued through Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, to reach its pinnacle with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. There was also a long history of self-help that began with the Free African Society, established by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in 1787, the mutual aid societies that spread throughout the northern states prior to the Civil War and reached their peak with the NAACP and the National Urban League.

These two threads in the black church experience converged in the 1980s, as black ministers dedicated themselves and their churches to the development of a positive black consciousness and identity. In 1976 the Reverend Floyd H. Flake was appointed the minister of Allen AME Church in Jamaica, Queens, New York. This was a middle-class congregation of 1,400 members. Over the next ten years, Reverend Flake and his congregation worked to remake their community. The church raised millions of dollars, erected buildings, and established a number of nonprofit corporations to provide educational programs for the young and social service programs for the elderly. Such activities were not unique. Other black churches throughout the country carried on similar activities: Shiloh Baptist Church of Washington, D.C., Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, and Ward AME Church of Los Angeles.

This growth of self-awareness also occurred in the American Catholic Church. Between 1945 and 1975 the number of black Catholics grew from 296,988 to 916,854. As of 2008 there were more than 2 million. In 1970 the National Office of Black Catholics was established under the direction of Father Joseph M. Davis, S.M., and in 1980 the Institute for Black Catholic Studies was established at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Both of these worked to establish a black identity in the American Catholic Church by developing a strong African American ministry and worship ceremonies that could relate to the history and culture of blacks, such as the use of drumming and African music. In 1984 the ten black Catholic bishops in the United States called upon black Catholics to contribute their history to aid in the development of the American Catholic Church at large. Finally, in 1987, after a lapse of ninety years, the African American Catholic Congress met again for the purpose of emphasizing the role of blacks in the history of the American Catholic Church.

Even as many observers grieved over the secularization of American society and the decline of religion in America, in 1996 the largest gathering of black men in American history took place in Washington, D.C., under the direction of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Many other religious and civil black leaders were critical of Farrakhan and his so-called Million Man March; nevertheless the great number of black men who participated in this event did reflect the strong sense of church that continued to exist in the black community. In 1938 the U.S. Census estimated that 5.7 million blacks out of a total black population of 12.8 million were church members; nearly fifty years later the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches estimated that black church membership exceeded 17 million. Such numbers and the expansive list of social programs carried on under the auspices of the black church clearly indicates that as the twenty-first century begins, the black church remains an important institution in the black community.

[See also AME Church; Baptist Church, African Americans and; Divine, Father; Farrakhan, Louis; Flake, Floyd; Garvey, Marcus; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Muhammad, Elijah; Nation of Islam; Religion; Religious Communities and Practices; Southern Christian Leadership Conference.]

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