Article July 25, 1901 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from Mark Guy Pearse

Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Institute, delivered an address at the Summer School of Theology at Harvard on the subject: "The Religious Aspect of the Negro Problem in the South." Among other things he said:—

"I am probably safe in saying that every black man brought as a slave into America was a heathen; that is, that he had no knowledge of Christianity. At the end of the slavery period there probably was not one who did not have some idea of what Christianity means. I do not mean by this to defend slavery. It was a curse to all concerned; greater, perhaps, to the Southern white man than to the Negro himself. But perhaps we do not give enough credit to the Southern white people for the religious work which they carried on during the slavery period, and the results which they accomplished.

"This work, however, emphasized the abstract side of religion rather than its concrete applications. All were agreed, as all are agreed now, that the Negro's soul ought to be treated properly so far as the next world was concerned, but the sentiment was not so strong as regards his body in this world. This was only one evidence of a disposition not wholly lacking in some pulpits of the present day, to dwell upon the things of the next world rather than the things of this one; a tendency to divorce religion from the practical things of life. And the greatest problem which we have to contend with among the Southern Negroes to-day is to make the professions of their religion correspond to their practice in every-day life."

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