Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [353]
With justification, the AME Church boasted in 1870 that it had sent the first missionaries, black chaplains, and the highest black commissioned officers to the South. More recently, to cap this “glorious record,” it had provided the first black postmaster in the South, the first black delegate to a constitutional convention, numerous state legislators, and a United States senator—Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi, who only a few years earlier had been organizing AME churches in Vicksburg and Jackson. “A remarkable feature of all these promotions,” the journal of the AME Church added, “is, that all the men remembered the ‘rock whence they were hewn’—they remain strong African Methodists, and are using their increased influence to spread its borders.” After assuming his duties as an organizer for the AME Church in Georgia, the Reverend Henry M. Turner would become an active figure in the Republican Party and subsequently serve in the state constitutional convention and in the legislature. The Reverend Richard H. Cain established a political base in Charleston, where his Emmanuel Church soon became “one of the strongest political organizations in the State”; he would serve in the state constitutional convention and in the state senate. The Reverend Jonathan C. Gibbs, who came to the South as a Presbyterian missionary, would rise to political power in Florida as secretary of state and superintendent of public instruction. After years of missionary work in the South, the Reverend James Lynch returned to Philadelphia to edit the Christian Recorder, but in June 1867 he announced that “convictions of duty to my race” impelled him to relinquish his editorial post “to go to a Southern State, and unite my destiny with that of my people, to live with them, suffer, sorrow, rejoice, and die with them.” That would take him to Jackson, Mississippi, where he quickly became a leading Republican politico whose popularity elevated him to the state senate and to the position of secretary of state of Mississippi.40
With the withdrawal of thousands of blacks from the white-dominated churches, the black church became the central and unifying institution in the postwar black community. Far more than any newspaper, convention, or political organization, the minister communicated directly and regularly with his constituents and helped to shape their lives in freedom. Not only did he preach the gospel to the masses in these years but he helped to politicize and educate them. Many of the black missionaries and clergymen also assumed the position of teachers, and very often the classrooms themselves were housed in the only available quarters in town—the church. While northern black missionaries envisaged in an educated ministry and congregation an end to the excesses that marked the religious worship of southern blacks, even the old slave preachers, many of whom were illiterate, understood the value of knowledge and implored their people to make certain that the new generation learned the word of God in ways that had been denied the parents. “Breddern and sisters!” one such preacher declared. “I can’t read more’n a werse or two of dis bressed Book, but de gospel it is here—de glad tidings it is here—oh teach your chill’en to read dis yar bressed Book. It’s de good news for we poor coloured folk.”41 If some elderly blacks flocked to the newly opened freedmen’s schools in the hope of reading the Bible before they died, the young thirsted for a knowledge not only of the Scriptures but of those subjects that would help them to improve their lot in this world.
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“CHARLES, you is a free man they say, but Ah tells you now, you is still a slave and if you lives to be a hundred, you’ll STILL be a slave, cause you got no education, and education is what makes a man free!” Nothing that any missionary educator or Freedmen’s