The southern church and the Negro 1889

The Southern Church and the Negro, 1889 is a work by Atticus Greene Haygood, the American Methodist bishop, college president, and writer on race relations who lived from 1839 to 1896. Haygood was one of the most influential white Southern voices arguing for racial moderation and for the religious, educational, and economic advancement of African Americans during the difficult decades after Reconstruction.

The book addresses the specific question of the responsibility and the role of the Southern Christian churches in the religious life and social development of the African American population of the South. The decades after Reconstruction had seen a substantial reorganization of African American religious life, with the establishment of independent Black denominations including the various African Methodist Episcopal churches and the National Baptist Convention, alongside the continuing presence of African American members in the older predominantly white Southern denominations. The question of how white Southern Christians should understand their religious responsibilities toward their African American neighbours was one that Haygood and other moderate Southern church leaders thought required serious attention.

Haygood had spent much of his career as president of Emory College in Atlanta and as a leader in Methodist missionary work in the South, including substantial involvement with the African American educational programs that Northern Methodist organizations were funding in the South after the Civil War. His own book Our Brother in Black of 1881 had been one of the more important white Southern works arguing for serious investment in African American education and for the gradual integration of African Americans into Southern civic and economic life. The Southern Church and the Negro continues this work with particular attention to the religious dimension of the broader question.

Haygood’s position was moderate by the standards of his time and place but would seem deeply compromised by modern standards. He accepted the basic framework of racial segregation and did not advocate for full political equality between white and black Southerners in the manner that the more radical abolitionists and their Reconstruction era successors had done. Within that limited framework, however, he consistently argued for serious religious, educational, and economic engagement with the African American population in ways that distinguished him from the more openly racist majority of white Southern church leaders of his period.

The book is mostly of interest now to historians of late nineteenth century American race relations and of Southern Christianity. It pairs naturally with Haygood’s other writings on race.