"The Negro Church is the only social institution of the Negroes which started in the African forest and survived slavery; under the leadership of priest or medicine man, afterward of the Christian pastor, the Church preserved in itself the remnants of African tribal life and became after emancipation the center of Negro social life." - Report of the Third Atlanta Conference, 1898.
According to W.E.B. Du Bois, after the Civil War during Reconstruction, how to train ex-slaves for a life of independence easily became a central problem. Three agencies undertook the solution of this problem at first and their influence. Without them the problems of Reconstruction would have been far graver than they were. These agencies were: (a) the negro church, (b) the negro school, and (c) the Freedmen's Bureau.
After the war the white churches of the South got rid of their negro members and the negro church organizations of the North invaded the South. The 20,000 members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856 leaped to 75,000 in 1866 and 200,000 in 1876, while their property increased sevenfold.
The negro Baptists with 150,000 members in 1850 had fully a half million in 1870. There were, before the end of Reconstruction, perhaps 10,000 local bodies touching the majority of the freed population, centring almost the whole of their social life, and teaching them organization and autonomy.
They were primitive, ill-governed, at times fantastic groups of human beings, and yet it is difficult to exaggerate the influence of this new responsibility—the first social institution fully controlled by black men in America, with traditions that rooted back to Africa and with possibilities which make the multitude of black American churches to-day, with their three and millions of members, the most powerful negro institutions in the world.
Against this backdrop, in 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois published in book form the results of a study on the Negro church titled "The Negro Church" studying the religion of African-Americans and its influence on their moral habits.
About the W.E.B. Du Bois:
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 –1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Other books by Du Bois include:
• The Study of the Negro Problems (1898)
• The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
• The Negro in Business (1899)
• The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
• "The Talented Tenth", second chapter of The Negro Problem, a collection of articles by African Americans (September 1903)
• Voice of the Negro II (September 1905)
• John Brown: A Biography (1909)
• Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (1909)
• Atlanta University's Studies of the Negro Problem (1897–1910)
• The Negro (1915)
• The Gift of Black Folk (1924)
• Africa, Its Geography, People and Products (1930)
• Africa: Its Place in Modern History (1930)
• Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
• What the Negro Has Done for the United States and Texas (1936)
• Black Folk, Then and Now (1939)
• Color and Democracy
