The Importance of Florida for the Early Pentecostal Movement
(1909-1923)
David Michel
Chicago Theological Seminary
In recent years, there has been a renaissance of Pentecostal studies. Yet the new surge of scholarship on American Pentecostalism has tended to be more generalistic in orientation.[1] Even Grant Wacker's Heaven Below has failed to pay attention to regionalisms. One outcome of this limited focus has been that the whole mix of ethnicity and race has not been fully explored. Generally, ethnicity has been studied only within the framework of black/white polarizations, or white/Hispanic tensions, which do not do justice to places like Florida.[2]
This paper will argue that the presence and idiosyncrasies of Bahamians allowed the Church of God (COG), a white Pentecostal denomination, to reach out to native blacks from 1909 onward. Although the COG was founded in 1886, it did not report black membership until 1909, when Bahamians started joining. I will proceed by describing the early growth of the COG and its connection with blacks in Florida, analyze the COG's lack of black outreach, and finally identify some particularities that helped spread Pentecostalism in Florida and beyond.[3] Primary materials to be reviewed are the well-detailed diary of A.J. Tomlinson, COG leader for twenty years (1903-1923) and editor of the Church of God Evangel, and early church minutes.[4]
Church of God and Blacks in Florida (1909-1923)
The COG was founded in 1886 by a group of former Tennessee Baptists who joined the holiness movement in 1896. In 1903 Tomlinson, a former Quaker from Indiana, joined the COG and was given the pastorate of the church at Camp Creek, North Carolina, the only congregation of the new group. In 1904 he moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, and in 1908 invited G.B. Cashwell, a minister of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, to preach at the annual assembly. As Cashwell was preaching, Tomlinson spoke in tongues as he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The COG was now a Pentecostal organization.[5]
The COG entered Florida when Tomlinson organized a white congregation in Tampa in May, 1909. During a following revival preached at the Pleasant Grove Camp Meeting in Durant, Tomlinson welcomed more than one hundred members into the COG.[6] During the same year, a black congregation was later organized in Jacksonville through the agency of Sampson Ellis Everett. Everett, who was from Jacksonville, was saved through the preaching of Edmund Barr, a Bahamian immigrant who had joined the COG when Tomlinson first preached in the Pleasant Grove Camp Meeting. At this meeting, Tomlinson licensed and ordained seventeen whites and two people of color, Edmund and Rebecca Barr, as ministers.[7] Everett went back to his hometown and ministered to his family, which became the nucleus of the Jacksonville COG, the first African American congregation of this white Pentecostal organization.[8] However, the Jacksonville congregation was not the first founded by people of African descent: a Bahamian congregation had been planted earlier in Miami by Barr, the first colored minister in the COG.[9]
Though an African American congregation was founded in 1909, black evangelism never caught the attention of either the general overseer or the Florida (white) ministers. Tomlinson went to Florida seven times between 1910 and 1922, but never visited the colored congregations. This he did while he used 75 percent of his official budget for transportation expenses. In 1911 he went on a missionary trip to the Bahamas along with ten other ministers, none of them being black.[10] No black church was either founded or planted by Tomlinson in Florida between 1909 and 1923. In fact, the first time that Tomlinson visited a black church was in 1923 when he was facing challenges to his general overseership.[11]
It seems that from the above one cannot avoid the conclusion that the general overseer was not interested in black evangelism. Furthermore, the number of (Florida) black churches grew only from zero to two between 1909 and 1912 while the number of white churches increased from one to twenty-four.[12] This leads us to posit that, like Tomlinson, white ministers did not reach out to black folk. In contrast, they were interested in other ethnic groups. Missionaries reached out to Jews in Punta Gorda and M. S. Lemons, the state overseer, preached to Cubans in Tampa where some were baptized in 1913.[13] From 1910 onward, COG ministers sponsored various mission trips to the Bahamas and in 1921 John Ingram went to Bermuda while the black membership in Florida was less than forty by 1915.[14]
During the early years of the COG, white ministers did not preach to blacks even when they preached or planted churches among foreign blacks and Cubans in the Bahamas and Florida. In their stead, it was British West Indians who were to reach American blacks.
Analysis of the Church of God's Lack of Black Outreach (1906-1923)
After this general overview, I will discuss factors that can explain the attitude of the COG toward blacks.[15] These are: indifference, lack of evangelical boldness, pure pragmatism, and the position of the church on the labor movement. White indifference can be noted by the fact that, at the 1910 General Assembly, no officials made any reference to the first colored ministers and congregations that had joined the COG in 1909.[16] Another obvious indication of indifference resides in the fact Tomlinson never bothered to visit or preach in a colored community, even when he went to Florida seven times between 1910 and 1922. Meanwhile, Mexicans attended the Cleveland congregation, Cuba was explored as a mission field in 1910, and one Hispanic congregation from New Mexico was welcomed in 1911.[17]
Mexicans seemed to have received quite some attention. One white preacher described a revival he was preaching in Corrumpa in 1914 as follows: “I have been here since last Friday. It has rained everyday and yet we have good crowds: Ten have been saved so far ... There have been nothing but Mexicans in the meeting so far, but it does me good to look into their earnest hungry faces.”[18] From this statement, it is obvious that the church had interest in minority groups but not in blacks. This indifference can be understood within the historical framework of the post-Reconstruction South. America was living through the most racist period of its history and Tennessee, where the COG’s headquarters was located, was a former state of the Confederacy and the first to have passed Jim Crow laws in 1881. These tough racial conditions led the ground for Pentecostals to entertain reservations toward blacks even when the message of Pentecost would have inclined them to do otherwise.[19]
Another important component to keep in mind in trying to understand this lack of outreach is the absence within the COG of what I call "evangelical boldness," that is, a willingness to get around Jim Crow restrictions in preaching the gospel. We have already mentioned that white COG leaders did not preach to blacks in Florida. However, that was not the case for all white Pentecostals. In 1917 Aimee Semple McPherson, an independent Pentecostal evangelist, went to preach to white people in Miami.[20] After noting that blacks did not come to her meetings, she moved to the colored section where she held a camp meeting for the people living there. Later, she repeated the same scenario in Key West. Then McPherson went to West Palm Beach, Florida and Pulaski, Virginia where she preached to blacks and in black churches.[21] Thus, however, were the Jim Crow restrictions in southern cities. This did not absolutely hinder the preaching of the Gospel, especially if white evangelists were welcomed to preach in the colored settlements.
Another factor is pure pragmatism. There were other black denominations that were working in the South, such as the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and the United Holy Church of America (UHCA). Since the COGIC had three black congregations in Tennessee by 1907 and the UHCA had 120 congregations in Virginia and North Carolina by 1921, it could have been felt that black Pentecostals could better reach their own people. Generally, that was the attitude of the Assemblies of God in southern states where it welcomed Hispanics but not blacks.[22] On the other hand, blacks could be taken to have shunned the COG primarily because of a growing bent toward religious autonomy in the South since the end of the Civil War. Thousands of southern blacks had left white denominations to found the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (1870) and the National Baptist Convention (1895). Pentecostal blacks left the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church to form the Colored Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, which claimed twenty-five congregations and sixty-seven ministers by 1908. Similarly, blacks left the Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1913.[23] In 1916, 95 percent of all black Christians belonged to black denominations and by 1929, 90 percent of black believers were affiliated with black churches.[24] Clearly, it can be maintained that, for the sake of religious independence, blacks were not interested in joining the COG. Another factor that mitigated against blacks attending the COG is of course the perception that they would be mistreated and segregated as in antebellum churches. Although the COG had held annual assemblies in Cleveland starting 1906, there was no record of black attendance before November 1913.[25]
Another probable reason for blacks to ignore the COG was its stand against labor unions. In 1913 no union member could be a member of the church.[26] This ban was later rescinded with the caveat that no minister should ever become a union member.[27] Since many blacks were coal miners in southern Appalachia and the labor movement was trying to organize in the early decades of the past century, the COG must have looked much too conservative. [28] To the above factors, one could add that Florida blacks could have had reservations about the COG in the early years because in the colored constituency was predominantly Bahamian; certainly one can not dismiss the possibility that ethnic tensions that existed in the secular society between foreign and native blacks were also extant in the religious sphere.[29] In concluding this section, I must underscore that it would be difficult to maintain that Tomlinson was a racist.[30] He was a northerner, having been raised in Westfield, Indiana. His grandparents had been involved in the antislavery movement and hid slaves in the Underground Railroad. In fact, Tomlinson's closest neighbors in Westfield had been black families and he made a positive reference to John Brown, a white abolitionist leader, in his book, the Last Great Conflict published in 1913.[31] At best, Tomlinson may be the example of a northerner who had to accommodate himself to southern customs.
Florida Factors
Several factors encouraged these British West Indians to join the COG: the presence and openness of Bahamians to white rule and evangelism, the potential use of the local church as a means to overcome social deprivations; the desire for social promotion; and the interracialism of holiness believers. These factors generated a push toward spreading Pentecostalism in Florida.
From 1900 to 1930 between 80,000 and 90,000 British West Indians entered the United States. Among them 3,000 Bahamians settled in Florida. By 1920, 5,000 Bahamians formed 52 percent of the colored population in Miami.[32] What first encouraged Bahamians to work with a white church was their colonial experience with the Church of England back home.[33] Since they were used to having white Anglican bishops, they were not averse to having white Pentecostal leaders and associating with white churches in America. In fact, Bahamians attended the Ebenezer United Methodist Church and the first Bahamian Episcopal churches in Florida had been served by white rectors.[34] This latter point suggests that Barr could have been appointed as overseer because of his ability to relate to whites. In November, 1909, Barr took money from R.M. Evans, a white COG minister, and then landed in the Bahamas as an unofficial missionary. In early 1911, Tomlinson went to the Bahamas and observed first-hand the interactions between Barr and white Bahamians in this mixed country.[35] By 1912 the COG was so familiar with Bahamians that Barr was made the first ordained colored minister. I want to also claim that Barr was ordained because he knew how to relate to American blacks to whom the church had not been reaching out. This view is further strengthened by this notation on Tomlinson's diary on the occasion of Barr’s ordination: "Held a conference meeting yesterday to consider the question of ordaining Edmond Barr (colored) and setting the colored people off to work among themselves on account of the race prejudice in the South."[36] It would appear from this statement that Barr was ordained not merely because he had already been pastoring, but specifically for the purpose of evangelizing colored people.[37] Moreover, that this was Tomlinson's intent can be further confirmed by appreciating the constitutional significance of the act of ordination itself. In the COG, elevation to the ordained ministry granted the incumbent the authority to ordain ministers or license evangelists, which authority would be needed if Barr were to evangelize and plant churches among the colored people.[38] Though apparently Barr was not given any official position through ordination, it is clear that he acted as if he were a state overseer by organizing colored churches and camp meetings. In fact, he even baptized people in camp meetings.[39] Barr served as overseer from 1915 to 1917 and between 1917 and 1922, Florida and other southern black churches were put again under white supervision. In 1922 Thomas J. Richardson, an African American, was made overseer of black churches. In 1923 he left the COG when Tomlinson was impeached.
Speaking of evangelism, one must say that Bahamians were committed to preaching outside the COG. Barr was successful in evangelism, which was the essential ethos of this Pentecostal organization. Writing in 1913, Tomlinson noted that
when we fully realize the value of souls, the awfulness of hell, and have attained such a love for Jesus that His words will sink into our hearts like stones into water, then and not until then will we awake to the full responsibility that is now resting heavy upon us. We are so slow! Millions are dropping into hell that could have been rescued while we are studying and planning what to do.[40]
Continuing in the same vein, Tomlinson spoke as follows in his 1914 annual address:
This is a time when every one that can preach or conduct a prayer meeting ought to be in the field. We speak in the fear of God, from a sincere heart, when we say that the world ought to be evangelized in this generation, and we should not dare to thrust this responsibility on a future generation.[41]
As previously noted, Barr was so evangelistic that he introduced African Americans and Bahamians to the COG in 1909. He was the agent of black evangelism that the COG had been looking for. In due time, Miami became the center of evangelism for the black COG.[42] Of course, it was not Barr and Bahamian men alone who engaged in evangelism. Janet Spencer has identified at least eight other Bahamian women who evangelized in South Florida from about 1912 to 1922.[43]
Social deprivations also encouraged these British West Indians to join the COG. We know, for example, that in Miami Bahamians formed Episcopal and Catholic parishes even when there had been white churches of the same confession. In fact, two Episcopal parishes, founded by Bahamians, were called "Nassau churches" because these foreign Anglican immigrants made no attempts to proselytize native blacks.[44] As foreigners, Bahamians were easily identifiable by their British accent and cultural manners and thus vulnerable to both white racism and black ethnocentrism. From the white community, Bahamians suffered from racism, segregation, and police brutality, to the extent that they requested that a British vice consul be appointed in Miami. Some joined Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). From the African American community, they were exposed to isolation and the children of Bahamians who were British citizens were charged extra fees in colored public schools. This may help us partially explain why St. Agnes and Christ Church, two Bahamian parishes, opened up parochial schools.[45] Joining small COG congregations gave Bahamian immigrants a warm place where they could regroup and minimize cultural shock. These immigrants were for the most part farming and construction workers and a small close-knit congregation allowed them to fight social deprivations such as being called “niggers” (for the first time) and other potential aberrations associated with their cultural mores and occupational status.[46]
Institutional factors also contributed to making the COG appealing to those immigrants who had aspirations to leadership. The COG did not have high educational requirements for ordination. Anyone who would answer some basic doctrinal questions could be licensed as a minister. This was much simpler than the sophisticated ordination examinations of the Anglican Church with which these immigrants were familiar back home. The COG granted to ordained ministers the title of “bishop,” the same conferred to ecclesiastical superiors by the Church of England in the Bahamas. This title conferred to poor black immigrants must have increased self-esteem in their own eyes and those of their fellow compatriots, especially when one remembers that few native priests were being ordained in the Bahamas.[47] In the case of Barr, the quest for social promotion was evident since he evangelized and planted churches in view of becoming a state overseer.[48] This quest for social promotion must have agitated Bahamian women as well since the COG also licensed women as “evangelists,” which title granted them the right to be called “ministers,” a privilege they would not have been able to attain in the Church of England.[49]
Another element that must be factored into the initial entry of Bahamians in the COG is the interracialism of the Pleasant Grove Camp Meeting. Founded in 1885, this former Methodist camp meeting was taken over by holiness Methodists who later formed the South Florida Holiness Association.[50] While we are still waiting for a definitive work on race relations in the holiness movement, scholars generally claim that holiness people were somewhat more open to interracial participation than others.[51] This interracial openness was demonstrated in the fact that both whites and blacks preached among members of the opposite race in camp meetings, churches, and other selected settings. Holiness denominations varied as to the level to which they welcomed blacks, however. During the postbellum era, African Americans such as Amanda Berry Smith had preached in white Methodist camp meetings and churches in many northern cities.[52] Similarly, in Philadelphia white Methodist preachers had attended meetings in a black African Methodist Episcopal church.[53] It was this racial openness, coupled with holiness piety, which allowed the Pleasant Grove holiness people to welcome Barr at their camp meeting in 1909.[54] It was this welcoming that led the way for further black outreach in Florida and other states. From 1909 to 1922, the number of colored churches grew from zero to nineteen in Florida while nationwide the same number reached thirty.[55] Today there are more than 500 colored churches and a colored membership estimated at 50,000.[56]
At this end of this study, two things must be evident. First, the COG did not make black evangelism one of its priorities in the early decades of the past century. White ministers in Florida simply did not preach to blacks. On the other hand, Bahamians had no inhibitions about working in a white church and committing themselves to reaching out to their own and the native blacks. Positively, this study has found the black/white paradigm no longer valid or sufficient to interpret the experience of Bahamians and American blacks in the COG in Florida. Instead, it demands that this paradigm be replaced by a triple paradigm, a white/ black immigrant/native black framework. Implications of this study are that closer attention must be paid to ethnicity, migration, and culture and that generalizations are no longer sufficient to interpret American Pentecostal history.
[1] A sample of recent studies would include: Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995); Edith L. Blumhofer, ed., Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For a worldwide survey, see: Stanley Burgess, ed., International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002).
[2]For a discussion of black Pentecostalism, see Synan, Movements, 167-86. For a treatment of Hispanic Pentecostalism, see Gaston Espinosa, “Borderland Religion: Los Angeles and the Origins of the Latino Pentecostal Movement in the U.S., Mexico, and Puerto Rico, 1900-1945” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999); and E. Wilson and J. Miranda, “Hispanic Pentecostalism”, in International Dictionary, 715-23. To date, there is no scholarly work on early white, non-English speaking immigrant Pentecostals such as Italians, Scandinavians, and Germans. Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 114-37.
[3]In 1912 more than half of Church of God (COG) congregations were in Tennessee and Florida. Overall, the COG reported sixty-six congregations with fourteen in Tennessee and twenty-four in Florida, General Assembly Minutes: Photographic Reproductions of the First Ten General Assembly Minutes 1906-1914 (Cleveland: White Wing Publishing House, 1992), 127-28. Hereafter General Assembly Minutes will be abbreviated as “GA.”
[4]Throughout this paper, I will use the word “black(s)” to identify American-born blacks and the word “colored" to refer to Bahamians and African Americans.
[Selected Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians, Annual Meeting, 2004,]
©2005 by Florida Conference of Historian: 1076-4585
All Rights Reserved.
[5]Charles Conn, Like A Mighty Army: A History of the Church of God (Cleveland: Pathway Press, 1977), 1-85. Early Pentecostals believed that speaking in tongues was the initial evidence of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. This was the entry experience into Pentecostal life.
[7]Conn, Mighty Army, 98-99; Harold Hunter, “A Journey Toward Racial Reconciliation: Race Mixing in the CGP,” Paper prepared for the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, 7.
[8][Christopher Moree], “Edmund S. Barr,” unpublished paper, H. Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Lee University, Cleveland; David Roebuck, "A Day in the Life of Rebecca Barr: Our First Woman Evangelist," available from http://www.churchofgod.cc/heritage/Barr.PDF; Internet; accessed 9 January, 2003; E.L. Simmons, History of the Church of God (Cleveland: Church of God Publishing House, 1938), 85.
[9]The Miami church was founded for Bahamian immigrants and Barr can be assumed to have been the founder since he was Bahamian and that no white COG minister is known to have preached to colored people in Miami. Simmons, History, 93.
[10]Tomlinson, based in Cleveland, held seven evangelistic tours in Florida during: 29 April-June, 1909; 3 October -11 November, 1909; 15 October-18 December, 1910; 4 June-24 July, 1912; 18-26 May, 1913; 30 April-12 June, 1914; 19-31 May, 1915. A.J. Tomlinson, Diary of A.J. Tomlinson, Homer Tomlinson, ed., (New York: The Church of God, World Headquarters, 1949), I: 94-101, 116-31, 165-75, 211-13, 231-232; idem, vol. 3, 80-81, 87; GA, 313.
[11] Conn, Mighty Army, 175-76; A.J. Tomlinson, diary, 21 March, 1923, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; this is the original and handwritten diary of Tomlinson.
[12]GA, 240-42. There were four colored congregations in Florida by 1912: Jacksonville, Webster, Coconut Grove, and Miami. Not much is known about the Webster congregation, but Coconut Grove and Miami were definitely Bahamian congregations. Coconut Grove shared a Bahamian settlement, Kebo, and a Baptist church had been founded there in 1894 by a Bahamian minister, Samuel Sampson; since it is known that Bahamians attended the Coconut Grove COG, therefore it can be reasonably assumed that it was Bahamian. See Dorothy Jenkins Fields, “Colored Town, Miami, Florida: An Examination of the Manner in Which the Residents Defined their Community during this Era of Jim Crow” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Union Institute, 1996), 82; Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 34-36, 107, 111-112; and Janet Spencer, ed., Black Women in the Church: Historical Highlights and Profiles (Pittsburgh: Magna Graphics, 1986), 8.
[13]GA, 178; Church of God Evangel, 4 January, 1910, 7.
[14]Spencer, ed., Black Women, 2, 29; Charles Conn, Where the Saints Have Trod: A History of Church of God Missions (Cleveland: Pathway Press, 1959), 81; GA, 324; Minutes of the Eleventh Annual Assembly of the Church of God (Cleveland: Church of God Publishing House, 1915), 26. Hereafter Minutes of particular assemblies will be abbreviated.
[15]"Lack of black outreach" does not mean that there were no blacks in the COG; rather, it suggests that white ministers did not preach (or were not enthusiastic) in black communities before and after blacks entered the COG.
[16]GA, 75-83. Up to January, 1913, annual assemblies were held in January so that the next assembly after the founding of the first colored churches would have taken place in January, 1910.
[18]Church of God Evangel, 1 August, 1914, 7.
[19]Synan, Movements, 167; Bobby Lovett, ed., Profiles of African Americans in Tennessee (Nashville: Annual Local Conference on Afro-American Culture and History, 1996), xxxiv-xxxv. For a quick appraisal of early Pentecostal interracialism, see Wacker, Heaven Below, 227-33.
[20]McPherson worked as an independent evangelist before joining the Assemblies of God in 1919 and founding her own organization, the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, in 1922. C.M. Robeck, Jr., "McPherson, Aimee Semple," in International Dictionary, 856-57.
[21]Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences, and Sermons, and Writings (Los Angeles: Aimee Semple McPherson, 1919), 160-66, 173.
[22]Ithiel Clemmons, Bishop C.H. Mason and the Roots of the Church of God in Christ (Bakersfield: Pneuma Life Publishing, 1996), 66; Chester Gregory, The History of the United Holy Church of America 1886-2000 (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 2000), 86; Gary McElhany, "The South Aflame: A History of the Assemblies of God in the Gulf Region 1901-1940" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Mississipi State University, 1996).
[23]“100th Anniversary Celebration,” available from http://www.fbhchurch.org/time.html. Accessed 24 January, 2003; Synan, Movements, 166-169, 176; Sherry DuPree, African American Holiness Pentecostal Movement: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 146.
[24]William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African American Church in the South 1865-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 350; Eric Lincoln, ed., The Black Church in The African American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 67.
[25]GA, 279. Only one black attended the assembly in November, 1913, Edmund Barr, a bishop (“ordained minister”) from Florida. Black people and churches are identified by “C” (Colored) in the records.
[28]William H. Turner and Edward Cabbell, Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 159-72.
[29]By the end of 1913, another colored church was founded in Miami (Colored Town) where there already was a Bahamian congregation. This might indicate that there were tensions between Bahamians and blacks attending the same church. Minutes of the Tenth Assembly, 34.
[30]This is why I have used "indifference" instead of “racism” in defining Tomlinson’s attitude regarding black outreach. This did not mean that other COG folk might not have been racist or segregationist.
[31]Roger Glenn Robins, "Plainfolk Modernist: The Radical Holiness World of A.J. Tomlinson" (Dissertation., Duke University, 1999), 136, 147-50, 176; A.J Tomlinson, The Last Great Conflict (Cleveland, TN: Press of Walter E. Rodgers, 1913), 54.
[32]Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, s.v. “West Indians.”
[33]Spencer, ed., Black Women, 9, 48; DuPree, Dictionary, 201. Not all Bahamians went to churches affiliated with white denominations. Some attended Bahamian congregations affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. See Dunn, Black Miami, 113.
[34]Fields, “Colored Town,” 82.
[35]Conn, Missions, 50-52;
[36]A.J. Tomlinson, Diary, 4 June, 1912. Barr, who had been in the Bahamas since November, 1909, returned to America in 1911.
[37]We need to remember here that there were African American ministers in Jacksonville who were not ordained at that time. They may have overlooked because they were not evangelistic enough for white COG leaders.
[38]The COG had three orders of ministers: ordained elder (also called bishop), deacon, and evangelists.The evangelist was a preacher who was effective but not ready for ordination. The only difference between the evangelist and the bishop was that only the bishop could ordain other bishops and evangelists. All ministers could pastor churches. GA, 27, 67, 105.
[39]Church of God Evangel, 22 February, 1914, 2; 13 March 1915, 2. In January, 1911, it was decreed that it was the responsibility of state overseers "to have the oversight of his state and as much as possible conduct or order a general evangelistic campaign over his state during the year.” In COG parlance, this annual evangelistic meeting was (and is still) called a "camp meeting." GA, 109.
[41]Minutes of the Seventh Annual Assembly, 6-7. This reference and others (Great Conflict, 43, 53) to "evangelizing the world in this generation" suggests that Tomlinson was influenced by the motto of the Student Volunteer Movement that had been coined by A.T. Pierson. Dana L. Robert, "'The Crisis of Missions:' Premillennial Mission Theory and the Origins of Independent Evangelical Missions," in Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk, eds., Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicalism and Foreign Missions, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 38.
[42]Miami was the place of residence of Barr, the location of his pastorate, and the place where the annual colored camp meeting (1915-1917, 1923) convened. Between 1918 and 1921, there were no colored overseers and, probably, no colored camp meetings as well.
[43] Women evangelized in West Palm Beach, Deerfield Beach, and Fort Pierce among other cities. The eight listed by Spencer are: Priscilla Smith, Maude E. Duncombe, Marilita Weech, Zora Miller, Victoria Davis, Blanche Lowe Russell, Lillian Rahming, and Leanora Darville. Spencer, Black Women, 8, 26-29, 25-37.
[44]Dunn, Black Miami, 110, 115-16. This does not mean that the Bahamian churches did not have native black as members, through intermarriage for example.
[46]Ira Reed, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment 1899-1937 (New York: Columbia University Press, [1939] 1970), 124; Dunn, Black Miami, 97. The concept of deprivation theory is borrowed from Charles Glock, Religion and Society in Tension (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), 247. The average colored COG congregation was very small with an average of fifteen members and so was an ideal place for cultural exchange and solace for oppressed minorities. In 1915 seven churches reported 111members and in 1917 thirteen churches claimed 200 hundred members. The church Barr pastored in Miami had at about twenty-three members, [Christopher Moree], “Edmond S. Barr.”
[47]Harold Lewis, Yet With A Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church (Valley Forge: Trinity Press, 1996), 89- 90. Surprisingly, the titles for ministers were nearly synonymous in both the Church of England and the COG. In the Anglican Church there were bishops, priests, and deacons. In the COG there were bishops, deacons, and evangelists. Of course one difference was that the Anglican bishop was by definition a church executive while the COG bishop was not necessarily so. In the colored context, early colored ministers in the COG would have been poor while Anglican bishops were middle class.
[48]The position of state overseer was created in January 1911. An overseer was technically responsible for the churches in his state, both black and white, so that existing black churches would have been under white control. Barr was ordained in June 1912 and in November 1915 was made overseer of the colored churches in Florida. It is clearly apparent that Barr closely followed church politics and knew what to do in order to secure official recognition as a leader, GA, 107.
[50]The Methodists who joined the South Florida Association later forsook their denominational connection to Methodism. Janet M. Banks, Protestants in the Bay Area (Tampa: National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1992), 51; and Kenneth O. Brown, Holy Ground: A Study of the American Camp Meeting (New York and London: Garland, 1992), 42.
[51] See James Earl Massey, “Race Relations and the American Holiness Movement,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 31(Spring, 1996), 40-50.
[52]For a quick review of Amanda Berry Smith’s interracial meetings, see Adrienne M. Israel, Amanda Berry Smith: From Washerwoman to Evangelist (Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow, 1998), 57-64, 99-100; Almer M. Pennewell, The Methodist Movement in Northern Illinois (Sycamore, Ill: Sycamore Tribune, 1942), 278.
[53]David Daniels, “African American Pentecostalism in the 20th Century,” in Vinson Synan,ed., The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901-2001 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 267.
[54]The Methodist openness to blacks should not be understood as equivalent to a practice of racial equality. For example, though Methodists had appointed a black as missionary-bishop as early as 1856 one had to wait for 1920 to see the election of blacks to the episcopacy in the United States. J.H. Graham, Black United Methodists: Retrospect and Prospect (Washington: Vantage Press, 1979), 81,114, 116.
[55]This number does not include churches that were disbanded, or left the organization for the COGIC, possibly because of racial segregation in the COG. Paul Thompson argues that 40 percent of colored congregations (14 of 35) founded before 1919 left the COG by 1922. Paul Thompson, "‘On Account of Conditions that Seem Unalterable:’ A Proposal about Race Relations in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) 1909-1929," unpublished manuscript, 10. The COGIC had entered Miami by 1918 and was appealing to blacks since, in addition to being a black church, by 1919 it had developed a Sunday School department, a women’s department, a youth ministry, two industrial schools and a Bible Institute. In an era where self-sufficiency and racial pride were promoted, it was not easy for a white church to retain black constituents. Dunn, Black Miami, 116; Bobby Bean, This is the Church of God in Christ (Atlanta: Underground Epics, 2001), 49, 207; Sherry DuPree, Biographical Dictionary of African American, Holiness-Pentecostals, 1880-1990 (Washington: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 1989), 201; Buford Johnson, 82 General Assemblies of the Church of God of Prophecy: Historical Highlights 1906-1987, rev. ed. (Cleveland: White Wing Publishing House, 1988), 31-32.