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108 108 —5— The Most Neglected Area in Negro Education Notwithstanding the fact that the Negro ministers, as a group, have lost prestige, it is still true that the Negro minister is the most significant leader of the Negro masses. This being true, the best trained men and women should be the leaders. —mays, quoted in The Crisis In a 1933 article, “The Education of the Negro Ministers,” Benjamin Mays summarized many of the conclusions he had come to regarding black clergymen in The Negro’s Church: “Religion is non-competitive. Frequently it does not deal with social and economic needs. Often it projects its hopes in a distant future or dreams of a heaven where the values sought here, but unattained, will be realized in some far-off glory land.” As a result, “it was much easier for the Negro to achieve freedom in religion than it was for him to acquire it in other fields. . . . It is far more difficult to keep a man, though a slave, from expressing and practicing his religion than it is to prohibit him from expressing and exercising his social and political views. Religion is as close to man as breathing.” Ministers, he continued, were the “first to be accepted” among slaves, “primarily because of the nature of religion” and “partly because the minister was the first to be tolerated in appreciable numbers by slave owners.” And lastly, Baptists and Methodists required “no special formal training in order to preach.” Sociologically and religiously, black ministers were able to bypass the strictures of other professions because of ministry’s open access. “As a special representative of God,” he observed, the minister “was full-grown at the very beginning ” and had “won his way into the hearts of the people.” Black clergymen were indigenous ritual leaders within their communities. “He blessed the baby at birth, he married the adults, and in the hours of death and bereavement he shared the people’s grief; he consoled them and brought them comfort. These are chief factors that gave the Negro minister a place of preeminence in the Negro group.”1 The social status of black ministers was up for grabs. In a former time, Mays observed, “the minister was frequently the best and the only trained man of a given community.” However, the “grand rush” in attaining “high school and the most neglected area in negro education : 109 college education” within black communities made the education of black ministers “urgent.” He believed that the intellectual formation of black clergy was essential in addressing modern conditions. Mays sadly came to the conclusion that black theological institutions that trained ministers were the least progressive institutions. “As a result,” he reasoned, “the best students in Negro colleges, who go into ministry, have found it necessary to pursue their trainingattheUniversityofChicago,Union,Colgate-Rochester,Harvard,Drew, Oberlin, Boston University, Yale and other Northern Seminaries.” Bluntly he asserted ,“Negroseminariesare,forthemostpart,soinferiorinqualitythatNegro students are forced to take their religious training outside of Negro seminaries.” A student’s decision to attend a “Northern seminary should be a matter of choice rather than a necessity as now caused by the inadequacy of Negro seminaries .” He realized that all institutions of higher education that served black students suffered from neglect. To him, this was especially true in theological education. Mays wrote, “There is no denying the fact that one of the next steps in Negro education should be found in Negro theological seminaries.” These historically black seminaries, he believed, could be the “peer of any seminary in America.” He observed, “If religion is to be respectable, challenging, and increasingly helpful to the group, we have no other choice than to concern ourselves more in the future with theological education among Negroes than we have in the past.”2 There was one big problem. What theological institution would lead the charge in upgrading the professional education of black ministers? What black institution had enough resources to build a sustainable professional program? Most of the church-related private colleges had theology departments that were denominationally affiliated—for example, Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee (Congregationalist); Johnson C. Smith in Charlotte, North Carolina (Presbyterian ); Virginia Union in Richmond, Virginia (Baptist); Morehouse College in Atlanta (Baptist); and Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia (Methodist)—but none of these schools had the quality of trained faculty to offer the graduate professional training that he envisioned. But all that changed in 1934. When Mays completed his Ph. D. course work at Chicago, Mordecai...

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