Time Too Scars Black Churches of South

For most of its 129 years, Goodwill Presbyterian Church has been much more than a building to be used by its rural congregation on Sundays.

Founded two years after Abolition by 100 blacks who would no longer be contained in the “Negro worshipers” section of the local Presbyterian church, Goodwill served as an after-work gathering place for its members, a school for children and a fellowship hall for parents.

For everyone, it was a place to begin practicing self-reliance after generations of enslavement. The local black community was an extended family, and Goodwill was its home.

Now, in the 1990s, Goodwill has had the good fortune to escape the fires that have consumed more than three dozen black, rural churches in the South.

But it has not withstood the ravages of time and custom. A combination of social and demographic change is costing black country churches such as Goodwill their central place in African American society.

“It’s the slow passing of an age,” said C. Eric Lincoln, the William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of religion and culture at Duke University. “Today, fewer and fewer black people want to live in the rural settings that support these churches.”

If more than three dozen predominantly black churches had not burned under a cloud of suspicious smoke, Lincoln says sadly, few Americans might have paused long enough to note their passing.

“The cultural attrition was long before the fires, but nobody paid any attention,” said Lincoln, author of the 1991 study “The Black Church in the African-American Experience.” “What’s dramatic about cultural attrition? You can’t see it burn and you can’t attribute it to hatred.”

Ellaree Hampton, who attended the Goodwill school through the eighth grade and recently retired as a teacher in a neighboring county, echoes Lincoln’s thoughts from a more down-home perspective.

“The church was the center of life in this community,” she said. “I would not say that now. There are so many other things that the church has to compete with in the secular world.”

She also despairs that “so many things are a distraction for the young kids. Drugs. Sex. So many things. Unfortunately, the church is not the top priority, and we need black churches like the one I grew up in more now than ever.”

Yielding Their Role

It is one of today’s enduring myths that the black churches of the rural South remain breeding grounds for black social activism, where tomorrow’s Martin Luther Kings and Joseph Lowerys are being molded. The reality is that they have yielded much of their role of producing black leaders to mainstream institutions such as business and academia, from which blacks long had been excluded.

Anthropologist Carol Stack, who has written extensively about black Americans who have returned to their roots in the rural South, says the publicity surrounding the church fires illustrates how most Americans respond to the “symbolic connection” of black churches and the civil rights struggle.

“The burning of churches in the South makes it seem like they’re a threat to the white establishment,” said Stack, the author of a recently published book “Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South.” But Stack said she found from conversations with Southern church leaders that, in some ways, black churches are no longer at the forefront of change.

It wasn’t always that way. In its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s, Goodwill Presbyterian boasted more than 600 members. Now, after waves of black migration from rural poverty to urban opportunity and even suburban prosperity, that number is more like 300, nearly all of them descendants of the church’s first families.

That Goodwill exists at all stems, in no small measure, from the determination of rural black people emerging from the shadow of slavery to create a life of dignity.

“The black church was founded as a way of standing up to the white man,” said Thomas Terrill, a history professor at the University of South Carolina. “It represented a statement by African Americans to say, ‘I want to put some distance from myself and slavery.’

“The earliest churches were places in the South that were comparatively free from incursions from whites, a place that whites would not go, and therefore blacks didn’t constantly have to be looking over their shoulder for whites to step in.”

That pattern endured for 100 years.

Against Tough Odds

Southern black churches, especially those in hardscrabble farm patches such as Mayesville--a corn, poultry and hog farming community about 40 miles east of Columbia, the state capital--have always struggled against formidable odds. Often located on gravel roads in tree-shrouded clearings, rural black churches survived indifferent white businesses, hostile Ku Klux Klan members and the relentless cycle of boom and bust in the nation’s farming communities.

“In a true rural church,” Lincoln said, “the power belongs to the people in the church. The minister is pretty much a necessary evil. The real decisions lie with the people. There are not very many of them around today.”

All these characteristics make the rural, down-home church less attractive to increasing numbers of black folks who are returning to their Southern roots. According to recent census studies, black Americans are retracing their footsteps and returning to the South after a half-century exodus.

“By the end of the 1970s, the great migration had turned back on itself,” said Stack, a professor of women’s studies at UC Berkeley. An estimated 10,000 black Americans, she said, have returned to rural communities every year since about 1975.

“I think it’s going to take 20 years to know what the political impact of this will be,” she said. “But it is clear that the character of the folks who go back are more global in their perspectives than they were before they left.”

Lincoln said the returning black Americans were having “no impact on the rural churches” because, as he put it, “the people who have gone South in the last 20 to 25 years didn’t go back to the cotton plantations of the rural areas. They have gone to the urban and suburban areas of Atlanta and Memphis. So the churches just aren’t the big cultural factor they used to be.”

Inviting Targets

As a footnote, Lincoln added that the diminished role of black churches--the fact that they are empty much of the time--made them inviting targets for the arsonists who have recently burned many of them to the ground.

“A rural church tends to be a proprietary church, outside the centralized structures of a church governing body,” Lincoln said. “Often, they were founded because someone didn’t want to walk 30 miles to church every Sunday. They might have walked 15 miles, stopped right there and said, ‘I’ll build me a church.’ ”

In the case of Goodwill Presbyterian, the founding families moved only a mile away from the white church that they left, but they might as well have gone to the other side of the Earth.

Some old-timers in the congregation still vividly recall what things were like in the old days. John B. Moses, 76, calls them the “horse-and-buggy days”--the Sundays when he attended services with his mother, father and four brothers.

“I used to love to go to the church,” he said, “because our school friends would be with us and it would be a good time to get away from the fields and work.”

An elegant man in a starched white shirt, high-waisted trousers and clip-on suspenders, Moses sits in the parlor of his comfortable home and says he is proud that one of his cousins was a founding member of Goodwill Presbyterian. And he is prouder still that, as one of the family church’s oldest members, he has never strayed far from it.

As he talks, his long fingers gracefully whip and fan the air. His dead left eye is cloudy, but the right one is bright enough to see both the past and present clearly.

“Goodwill now is at the center of things for only those of us who remember,” he said. “Back then, back when I was coming up, there was no other place to go. The children don’t always follow their parents. Parents and grandparents may go back to Goodwill, but not all of the children. That is something that worries me.”

It also worries the Rev. Richard R. Baxter, pastor of Goodwill since 1991. More than half the members of his congregation are senior citizens and nearly a quarter are small children.

“Here, like in rural black churches everywhere, everybody is connected to everybody,” Baxter said. “Everybody is related by blood or marriage. They went to school together. When they die, they’re buried in the church cemetery together.”

Baxter points to a ramshackle, two-story building. “That was the Goodwill Parochial School,” he said, adding that the church has applied to state and federal authorities to have the school designated a historic structure to qualify for rehabilitation loans and grants.

“That was the school that the church and black folks in this community built for their children. If it hadn’t been built, there wouldn’t have been anyplace for them to attend school.”

Hampton, the retired teacher, says her strong ties to the church and its teachings contributed to her staying close to her parents. “I’ve often asked myself why I never left here,” she said. “But the Bible says to honor thy mother and father. I’ve never forgotten that from the first time I learned it in church. I guess you can say I never left my roots.”

Baxter, who grew up attending a rural, black church in North Carolina where his father was the preacher, says a tradition of community service binds rural black people to their church and homes. At times, Baxter says, that tradition seems more like distant history, something remembered from hours of listening to his father’s dramatic sermons.

“I don’t want to say that life, the country life, is gone totally,” Baxter said. “I would say it’s the encroachment of the urban life on rural areas makes it difficult to preserve what used to be good about country churches.

“Folks would come early in the morning and stay all day,” he said. “Now, black folks play golf on Sunday. That’s both good and bad, I suppose. It’s just a fact that people have more options now.”