israel1998

@Article{ israel1998,
    author = {Charles A. Israel},
    title = {From Biracial to Segregated Churches: Black and White Protestants in Houston, Texas, 1840--1870},
    journal = {Southwestern Historical Quarterly},
    volume = 101,
    number = 4,
    month = {April},
    pages = {428--458},
    year = 1998,
}

Israel argues that Black congregants within main Protestant churches exercised a measure of independence even before emancipation, though always under the supervision of white church leaders. “In the years before the Civil War, Houston Protestants had been moving toward racially segregated church bodies, but whites clearly intended to remain in charge of the new subordinate institutions” (440).

p. 431:

In the first meetings following its organization in April 1841, the First Baptist Church of Houston received into membership four “Colored Members” who attended worship services with their white “brothers” and “sisters.” The congregation met in members’ homes and in the City Hall until 1847, when the church [p. 432] acquired the members and funds sufficient to build a church house, complete with a gallery for the “colored members.”¹

p. 432:

By 1848 the Methodist Church in Houston claimed ninety-two white and 130 black members, who attended services together with the blacks crowded into a gallery that extended around three sides of the building.

p. 436:

It is difficult to tell when the Methodists resorted to separate services, but in 1848 Houston was included in an African Mission circuit under Orceneth Fisher, and by 1851 a separate wooden frame building for the use of the blacks had been built on the same lot as the white church.²

p. 437 mentions that there was discussion in 1850 of a separate house to be built for Black members of the Baptist church, but the subject was not mentioned again in the minutes “until April 2, 1859,”when ‘it was agreed that the coloured members of the church should have the privilege of selecting where they would have their house of worship located.’ … The Houston City Directory for 1866 reported the membership of First Baptist as ‘about forty whites and near one hundred colored.’"

p. 441: the main building for the white Methodist church collapsed on a Sunday in 1860 shortly after services. “After the church was destroyed, the white members of First Methodist met first in the wooden chapel the blacks had built on the same block, and then arranged to use the Lutheran church in the afternoons.”³ The white congregation then rebuilt a wooden structure on their lot, dedicated March 31, 1867.

Other sources indicate that the white congregation either “rented” or “occupied” the African Mission chapel on the original Methodist lot (445-446).

p. 441: minutes are missing for First Baptist from 1861 to 1868, but the building was very run down at end of war; they met sporadically in this period and (as the directory noted) the congregation was predominantly Black by 1866. “The Reverend F. M. Law acted as a self-supporting missionary to the church until he fled the town during the 1867 yellow fever epidemic, but there was no regular pastor for the church until J. B. Link accepted the post in May 1868,” though even then he also edited Texas Baptist Herald and traveled for Mission Board instead of preaching full time.

p. 446-447: discusses Elias Dibble and his identification with the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, by December 1865. A later white historian of the Shearn Methodist church (I. M. E. Blandin, writing in 1908) said that these northerners “came down and took possession of the negro congregation.” Israel reports (448) that “There is no record of a legal challenge over the ownership of the black-built chapel, and it appears that Dibble and his followers’ claims on the church were not strongly contested. Blandin records that the whites ‘gave the building to the negro congregation and required them to move it to a lot elsewhere.’”

p. 449:

Unfortunately white and black accounts disagree over the actual conditions of the removal of the African chapel—white sources claim that the move was ‘required,’ blacks that they were ‘allowed to remove’ the building to the new lot.⁴ Whether the black Methodists were forced to remove their chapel or whether they left of their own volition cannot be proven, but on February 3, 1866, a committee of seven individuals (apparently all blacks) filed a deed establishing themselves as the Board of Trustees of the new church and recording a $600 down payment by Frank Vance (‘col’d ice cream peddler’ in 1870 directory) of a city block bounded by Travis, Bell, Clay and Milam Streets valued at $1,200. Sometime after this, Dibble and the congregation moved the old frame church from the First Methodist lot up Milam Street to their new property. The trustees reserved half of the new lot for the church and sold the other plots to members, encouraging them to set up stable homesteads around the church.⁵

p. 447n49 identifies Rev. Joseph Welch (same one mentioned in Freedmens Bureau records?) of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Galveston as party to a clash with Black congregants who were seeking to leave and join AME.

p. 449: Notes the two independent Black churches mentioned in 1866 Directory: the one in Frosttown that likely referred to Mt. Zion Baptist Church and the other, listed then as meeting at German Methodist Church, as the likely progenitor of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. “A member of the German Methodist Church recalled the blacks meeting in the church [during the war], remarking that [p. 450] ‘they would pray for the success of the war. Some of the Bering [German Methodist Church] members were rather chagrined when they realized that they were praying for the success of the North rather than the South.’”⁶

p. 451: Israel Sydney Campbell came to Houston in summer of 1866…

just as the black Baptists were having to remove from the German church. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Campbell assisted the congregation in building a brush arbor on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou and reorganized the church, renaming it the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church. The congregation elected Campbell pastor, and he accepted the call to preach once a month; a local black man, Sandy Parker, officiated in his absence.

p. 451: Around that same time, the Union Baptist Association meeting in Brenham received a petition to admit “The First Colored Baptist Church, Houston,” and accepted it conditional on the church sending white representatives only to the association meetings.

p. 451: Campbell returned in spring 1867, adding 170 new members to Antioch and leading to erection of a “Box House” at corner of Rusk and Bagby.⁷

p. 452: Black Baptists from the region assembled at this building in July 1868 “to organize the Regular Missionary Baptist Lincoln Association,” and Jack Yates was ordained at this meeting “and called as pastor to Antioch.”

p. 456: concern expressed by white Protestants about northern missionaries educating Black Texans