p. 265 | In the South

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 23, 1901

In the South

J. E. White: Seven years ago last January, Brother Palmer and I went to a meeting at Atlanta, Ga. We went because we had made up our minds that we were going to have missionaries among the colored people in the South. We had found that first Testimony that had been sent in regard to the work in the South. We had read it, and we had talked with Dr. Caldwell, who had been working there; and we made up our minds that the Lord could use us in that kind of work.

We began to inquire about how the work was to be done. I was anxious to hear what instruction was to be given in regard to the work. Elder Kilgore spoke to the brethren, and said, “Here is Brother White, who has something to say to you in regard to the work among the colored people in the South.” You can imagine how I felt, when I myself had come there for instruction. I found that the brethren there had not been in the work. They had not been working for the colored people, and they had no instruction to give. Well, we talked it over with them, and learned all we could. We walked up and down the streets of Atlanta, and saw the colored people as they lived, and gained all the ideas we could. And yet when we went to the South, we knew practically nothing in regard to the situation there.

In the South there is a great work to be done for both white and colored. In regard to the colored people, it was told me that they were very ignorant, that many of them could not read; but the condition of the poorer white people astonished me.

In regard to the condition of the colored people of the South, I can touch on only a few points. We find the South not only a world of its own, but the colored population is a world within a world. It is rather more so than before the Civil War, because in those times the colored people were grouped around the “great house,” as it was called. In the country, there was the great house of the owner of the plantation; and around this great house were settled the colored people who worked the plantation. The people who owned or superintended them, were more or less associated with them. Before the war, the colored people in many instances, so far as I can learn, went to the same churches that the white people attended, having seats set apart for them in the gallery, or at the rear. Here they were privileged to listen to the same teaching that the white people listened to. But since the war, they have had churches and pastors of their own. What kind of preaching do they have? There are hundreds of colored preachers in the South who can not read a word from the Bible.

The colored people are intensely religious, and must have some kind of service and some kind of a preacher. So they picked out certain men who had a peculiar gift in prayer, or in exhortation, and engaged them as preachers. Around Vicksburg, Miss., a great many sermons are preached from the “Gospel Primer.” They take those simple stories into the desk, and those who can, read enough to get the point of the stories before their audiences.

In the South there are between seven and eight millions of these colored people who have no refining influence over them, because they have no associations with those who have had the opportunity of education, culture, and refinement. For that reason they are an entirely separate people from the white population. They are a superstitious people. You could not expect anything else. When we began holding meetings on the boat, the people who came once would always come again, and a story was started that the people who came onto the boat were “hoodooed;” so it was said to them, You must not go into that boat; for if you do, they will hoodoo you, and you will have to go again, because you can not stay away from it. But the truth they heard there won them. It was the gospel of Jesus Christ in its purity that had a controlling power to bring them back again.

We need schools in the South, not only to teach these people to read, but to teach them how to work, to teach them trades, the uses of implements, and how to farm. We need a literature for them.