For All That Was Written: The African American Church Narrative in North Carolina

The North Carolina Central University's Department of History, in association with the Global Studies Program, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, hosted the 5th Annual African Diaspora Studies Symposium on March 23. The theme “Documenting and Sustaining Memory in the Diaspora in the 21th Century,” seeks to explore the ways that communities see themselves and the ways that they are perceived by the dominant cultures that surround them.

My talk focused on how to use the African American denominational meeting minutes from the Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection. I showed how these meeting minutes highlight Black Church identity politics in North Carolina and how the written religious record communicates belief about faith, self-identity and country. The subject of my presentation "For Everything that Was Written: The African American Church Narrative in North Carolina" are the functions of narrative, authority and memory in church histories, clergy biographical and conference session meeting minutes represented in The Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection. I also connected Black Church identity politics in North Carolina to the importance of perserving cultural records, through the lens of Romans 15:4, “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”

As an up and coming theological librarian with enthusiasm for collections management and Africana History working with a large scale digitization project that seeks to generate interest in and give us the opportunity to talk about our diverse backgrounds and experiences is extremely fulfilling for me. 

The collection aims to document the cultural and religious history of the state from fluffy frozen peanut pie recipes to the church's response to the Civil Rights Movement to the local history of a retirement community.

The pamphlet, Christianity and race relations: messages from the second annual Conference on Human Relations, features addresses given at the second annual Conference on Human Relations, sponsored by the Department of Interracial Cooperation of the Baptist State Conventions of North Carolina. The purpose of these conferences was to bring Baptist Church leadership in North Carolina together annually for individual and group confrontation with what is Christian in the area of race relations. 

Church histories, anniversary booklets and meeting minutes not only document the passage of time and congregational occasions but are opportunities to tell and receive direction for the stories that frame the association’s existence. In these primary materials we see the church’s organization around seasonal and occasional events death, anniversaries, weddings, birth of children, changes in leadership, and the liturgical calendar all of which give structure and momentum to people’s lives.

In “But Who Do You Say That I Am? (Matt 16:15): A Churched Korean American Woman’s Autobiographical Inquiry Jung Ha Kim says “Reflection helps us to see alternative directions in our lives and reframing our stories according to the convictions and values we hold.” In these primary documents produced by African American associations and church bodies we see congregations participating in constructing their own stories and revisiting them throughout the life of the community. 

Another very revealing monograph is the 1926 Meeting Minutes of the Pee Dee Colored Baptist Association, specifically their Report of the committee on the condition of the nation, It reads: 

“Viewing the condition of the country politically, nationally and internationally in our clearest conception, we behold the condition of things with serious regret. We deplore the condition  of things pertaining to political unrest, evolution and crime; easy divorce; the violation of the 18th Amendment, and spiritual wickedness in high places, all of which seems to shake the very foundation of our national government, both church and state.”

“We are glad to note with unspeakable joy and profound gratitude to God and the strong arm of our national and state governments, that the condition of things have changed so very, very much that Lynch Law and mob violence have decreased 75 per cent. May God bless our great country and the Grand Old North State.” 

Are these statistics from the nation or North Carolina? Is the mention  of the18th Amendment and temperance referring to personal piety and alcohol consumption of members or point to the appeal for prohibition and miscegenation going hand in hand because that definitely was an issue black men needed to concern themselves with?

The formation and work of a committee on the condition of the country is an extremely progressive move on the part of this association. It the indicative of self-awareness and a firm grasp on what James Cone calls the difference between American Theology and Black Theology. In Black Theology and Black Power James Cone talks about how American Theology is closely identified with the structures of society. “The church cannot remain aloof from the world because the church is in the world. Theology, then if it is to serve the need of the Church must become ‘worldly theology’. Black Theology as seen in the report of the committee on the condition of the country deliberates on the issues in the larger culture while constructing a theology that is relevant to the life of the people the association serves.

 The overwhelming majority of church histories in this collection are packed with pictures. In Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices (1986) Delores S. Williams, encourages us to ask the question where are the women in the church and what are they doing? “The womanist theologian must search for the voices, actions, opinions, experience, and faith of women whose names sometimes slip into the male-centered rendering of black history, but whose actual stories remain remote.” What are contributions of women in the church? How are they highlighted and celebrated?

In the Centennial history of the Woman's Baptist Home and Foreign Missionary Convention of North Carolina, there are faces to match the leadership. This history was especially remarkable because it is an autonomous convention under the executive leadership of Black women dating back to 1884 before Women’s suffrage.


The call for papers for this symposium posed the question: How are academics, archivists, librarians, public intellectuals, and artists creating alternative archives and public memory?

I’ll admit when I submitted by abstract I did not have a concrete idea of what I wanted to write about out or how exactly I wanted to highlight the African American materials in the collection. When I began to prepare and starting scouring through these centennial programs and meeting minutes I thought I’d bit off more than I could chew with my grand statement “I will explore Black Church identity politics in North Carolina and how the written religious record communicates belief about faith, self-identity and country…
What I found myself writing about was my reading these narratives with a judgmental, uncritical eye. I was so ready to find the struggle these congregants in 20th century, black folks in rural North Carolina MUST have been having. I was guilty of reading imagined hardships into the text instead of examining how the stories are written and what can be learned from them as is.

I still have plenty of questions and as a librarian/archivist I have the tools to uncover the validity of my agenda setting. Are the authors Self-censoring or code switching? What else can be said of their connection to white denominations? What is un-published? Church meeting minutes like most business meeting minutes can be DRY. The significance is not what is not here but what is here and what else it points to. Just because stories about interactions with the surrounding white community, the going-ons of other black churches in the area, Jim Crow and clan violence, are not explicitly documented doesn’t mean that there is no evidence somewhere else. It might not seem like the churches put too much in there but was in there is very telling.