A Moses For Urban America

We realize that the key to our community is the church. The Black church is the only Black institution that has successfully survived the many obstacles hurled at it. It has survived slavery, post-slavery, and government-directed neglect. With such a track record of survival, it is the most qualified institution to empower the African-American urban community.

The Black church serves as the center of the African-American community's spiritual growth, and time will prove that the Black church will be the center of the African-American community's economic growth as well. There is no greater or more powerful institution that exists today for any group of people than that of the Black church. Where secular mentoring and conventional social services programs for poor urban youth typically end, churches and religious outreach ministries often begin, especially in predominantly Black communities.

The Black church has a unique and distinctively powerful youth and community outreach tradition. Indeed, the Black church's historic role in providing African Americans with education, social services, and a safe gathering place prefigured its historic role in the Civil Rights movement.

After the Civil War of 1861-65, there was a period when the hidden plantation church integrated with the church of the free Blacks, and life was organized and structured as never before. The influence of this period was very important. Whatever organized social life there had been in Africa was destroyed by enslavement in America. Plantation living made a structured family life impossible. Today, we are enslaved by the economic system and structured family life is still at risk. During slavery, fear of insurrection was one reason why Whites prohibited Blacks from organizing their religious life. They also knew that an outside social life from the plantation could cause Blacks to rise up for freedom. Du Bois summarized what the Black church provided:

The Negro church of today is the social center of Negro life in the U.S., and the most characteristic expression of African character. Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the "First Baptist" — a roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more persons, tastefully finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, small organ, and stained-glass windows. Underneath is a large assembly room with benches. This building is a central clubhouse of a community of a thousand or more Negroes. Various organizations meet there — the church proper, the Sunday School, two or three insurance societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainment, suppers, and lectures are held besides the five or six regular weekly religious services. Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is founded for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated, and charity distributed. At the same time, this social, intellectual, and economic center is a religious center of great power. -Du Bois 

Historically, the Black church has been a place of worship as well as a social center for the Black community. Now we need the church more than ever. We need to have a unified outlook on how the Black church can regain our urban communities. Many churches are providing social services to the community. However, we need to go to the next level to work with a model program that can have a major impact throughout urban America.