Rising to the Occasion: An Overview
At the turn of the 19th century, the Harvard-educated scholar and historian W.E. B. Du Bois pioneered a sociological study of African-American Protestant churches, becoming the first to define what he collectively termed the “Negro Church,” (Mellows, 2010.) These Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist churches that comprised Du Bois’ “Negro Church” were not a monolithic religious institution as the term implied, but each church held to its respective doctrinal variations as much as its white denominational counterpart. It was the common struggle African-Americans experienced as a system of racial apartheid took hold in the years following the Civil War and reconstruction that united black denominational churches. While some distinctive practices of evangelical faith were found in the early black denominations, the “Negro, “ or “Black Church” as it would be termed by subsequent historians, was, and is “a precipitate of its own culture, developed from and in response to its own experience,” (Lincoln, 1999, p.xix.) The aggregate institution known as the Black Church became united by its “cultural, historic, social, and spiritual mission” of protesting a racist society, (Calhoun-Brown, 2000, p. 169.) This mission would be expressed ultimately during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Black Church systematically took on a central role in securing legal protection and equal access to constitutional rights for minorities, culminating with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.