Saved and Sanctified: The Rise of a Storefront Church in Great Migration Philadelphia

2. City Tales

2 CityTales Mother Brown experienced a divine call to preach in Virginia. Similarly , many founding saints reported life-changing spiritual experiences that they had while still in their southern hometowns. However, it was in the northern urban center of Philadelphia that they answered their call to a life of holiness and, together, established an enduring religious institution. The story of The Church, then, is intimately bound up with the story of Philadelphia —its racial history, immigrant legacies, and unique place in the social history of the Black religious experience in America. Indeed, were this a drama rather than an academic study, Philadelphia would be listed among the dramatis personae, not merely as the setting. This chapter relates the story of the city in terms of encounters, moving chronologically from encounters between African religious expression and European American Christianity to encounters between northern Black churches and the spirituality brought by southern Black migrants. It recounts Black citizens’ struggles with segregation in both employment and housing and their encounters with hostile White mobs, as well as interethnic encounters between Blacks and Jews. The social history of religious and community life in Philadelphia grounds and complements the life histories of founding saints told in “Saints Tales,” the chapter that follows this one. Religious Encounters: African Spirituality, European American Christianity, and Black Independent Churches The racial history of Pennsylvania, particularly Philadelphia, is characterized by irony and contradiction. Pennsylvania was a slaveholding colony, but was also the home of Quaker-inspired antislavery activism. Philadelphia’s wealth was built upon trading in slave-produced commodities, and in 1700 one in ten residents was a slaveholder. William Penn, who gave the city its Greek-derived name, “City of Brotherly Love,” held slaves who toiled on his 30 · Saved and Sanctified estate at the same time that he aggressively pursued and secured religious freedom for his fellow English Quakers by founding the chartered colony of Pennsylvania (Ballard 1984: 19–20, 27). Philadelphia Quakers were teaching Blacks to read as early as 1750, but slavery was not legally extinguished until 1847 (Ballard 1984: 52, 59). During the Great Awakening, revivalism reached out to Black people in Philadelphia, which had one of the largest concentrations of free Blacks in America (Hopper 2008: 1–3). Much scholarly attention has been given to the socio-historical significance of Philadelphia as the locus of the first independent Black church, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (George 1973: 10–48; Gregg 1993: 2; Hopper 2008: 6–7).1 However, too little attention has been paid to the cultural significance of Philadelphia in the study of Black religion. Historical records include evidence of African forms of spiritual expression in the city, such as observations of Africans “dancing in numerous little squads,” singing “each in their own tongue accompanied by homemade guitars and instruments made of our gourds” (Ballard 1984: 28–29). Philadelphia annalist John Fanning Watson collected oral histories and documented the presence of African cultural practices before and after the American Revolution and noted that African languages were heard in the city as late as 1800. Watson observed that Black Methodists had a different and, in his eyes, suspect way of expressing their Christianity, and he recalled that when enslaved Blacks had been “allowed the last days of the fairs for their jubilee,” they danced “lightheartedly” for long periods of time in the Washington Square burial ground (Stuckey 1987: 22–24, 75; Nash 2006: 40–41).2 Following historian Sterling Stuckey, I believe that what Watson observed conforms to the West Africa–derived traditions of religious dance known as the “ring shout,” which celebrates the presence of spirit in the gathering and in the bodies of the faithful. This early documentation of the shout adds a cultural dimension to the political tradition of protest and self-determination in the religious history of Black Philadelphia. While Watson recalled with dread the contagious enthusiasm of the Black Methodists in Philadelphia, they appear to have become more liturgically staid by the time the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church founded branches in the South. Indeed, some Black northern clergy battled relentlessly with the “incurable disease” of impassioned and physically engaged worship in their southern congregations, where the fusion of religious fervor and political engagement had powerful consequences. Bishop Daniel Payne City Tales · 31 encouraged AME clergy to make members “stop their dancing,” cease singing “corn-field ditties,” and not feature “the ring” as an essential part...