Clergy

Early Leaders

Former slave preachers who allied themselves with missionary churches, many of them Baptist and Methodist congregations, gained some respect from white leaders in the antebellum period. Black preachers, such as the Baptist preacher George Liele of Georgia, Methodist circuit preacher Richard Allen, and Baptist preacher Andrew Bryan of South Carolina, traveled throughout the South and preached to both white and black congregations in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Each founded all-black churches in Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina.

Black preachers also established flourishing black churches in the North, such as the African Meeting House in Boston, established in 1805, and the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, founded in 1808. In the mid-1800s, a number of black clergy had varying degrees of involvement with the growing abolitionist movements. Some helped to organize antislavery societies, such as the Union Anti-Slavery Baptist Association, established in Ohio in 1843. Others concentrated on foreign missionary activities.

Support Roles in the Post–Civil War Era

In the years after emancipation in the 1870s and 1880s, black churches became the largest provider of support to freed slaves, who faced a daunting spectrum of economic and social challenges. In rural areas, especially, churches were often the only centers of organized activity. Black clergy acted as economic and political advocates, organizing schools, raising funds for the poor, and dealing with the crises of sickness and death.

In the early years of Reconstruction, black clergy also spearheaded efforts to establish a black political voice. For example, Bishop Henry M. Turner, a leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was elected to the Georgia legislature in 1868. A few years earlier, in 1865, Bishop James W. Hood, originally a preacher from New York, organized the first black political convocation in North Carolina and later rose within the established Republican Party in that state. Preachers in these years constituted 50 percent of the professional class in the South.

In the late 1800s, large numbers of African Americans migrated to northern cities, hoping to find work and other opportunities. Once again, it was the black clergy who provided essential services to this new class of displaced people. Many black churches in northern cities acted as social service agencies, providing housing, food, and jobs, while continuing to administer to the spiritual and cultural needs of migrants.

Ministers of the biggest and most prestigious northern congregations at this time gained great influence within the black community and sometimes in the white political sphere as well. Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, for example, attended the Atlanta Baptist College (later named Morehouse College) and then obtained theological degrees from Rochester Theological Seminary (in 1916) and Harvard Divinity School soon after. Johnson, who became president of Howard University in 1927, called for black clergy to act as social and political leaders. Many listened. In 1944, for example, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., head of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

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