The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.3, page 72, Aug. 1890, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers of the Baptist ministers of Alabama is to collect their salaries. They care no more for the moral and intellectual training of the people than they care for the snap of their finger. They care no more for schools, for public enterprises, than if there were no such things.... In some parts of the country where our missionaries travel, they find preachers who do not take a paper of any sort, nor read the Bible; in fact, they cannot read, and yet they are attempting to lead the people.'' So far as it goes, the foregoing extract tells the truth; but in order to' grasp the situation it is well to bear in mind that there are in the fifteen Southern States, including the District of Columbia, at least 7,ooo,ooo colored people to be reached with the Gospel. In their religious opinion these people are almost equally divided between the Baptist and Methodist denominations. This is about the numerical force: Colored Baptists, I, 120,000 church members, Cocoon churches', and 7,ooo ordained ministers; Methodists (divided into the African, Zion, Wesleyan, Northern, and Colored Methodist branches), with about the same numerical strength as the Baptists, making a total of 2,240,000 church members in these two denominations. In Alabama there are Congregational churches, with a combined membership of ~,326 persons, and an examination will show that the average colored Congregational members in each State will fall below ~,ooo, the average membership for each church being about 50. Outside of the two leading denominations Methodists and Baptists the combined membership of all other denominations, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc., in the South will not equal more than half of the numerical strength of the Congregationalists, so that it is safe to say that the total membership of all other denominations, exclusive of Methodists and Baptists, is about 22,500. About 2,264,500 of the 7,ooo,ooo are church members. But what is the character of the preaching that these masses receive, whether church members or not, and what does belonging to the Church mean to them? The ministers representing the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian Churches are, as a rule, intelligent and earnest, yet they are so cramped by denominational lines that they reach and influence but a small number. Now as to the intelligence, morality, and religious earnestness. After coming into direct contact with the colored ministers' for eight years in the heart of the South, I have no hesitancy in asserting that threefourths of the Baptist ministers and two-thirds of the Methodists' are unfit, either mentally or morally, or both, to preach the Gospel to any 72