REPORT OF DEPUTATION TO SOUTHERN CONGREGATIONAL SCHOOLS AND CHURCHES

To the Commission on Missions:

Your Deputation in presenting to you, and through you to the Congregational Churches, the impressions of its recent trip, desires to express its gratitude for a privilege which, though it involved exacting labor, brought abundant reward in enlargement of acquaintance and wider knowledge of the work which is being done for the upbuilding of the Kingdom of Christ. The generous welcome and multiplied courtesies extended by fellow-Congregationalists throughout the South made the journey a constant pleasure.

Southern Congregationalism must necessarily be studied in sharply divided departments. The necessity of this will be at once perceived when it is remembered that we have churches composed of Negroes and churches composed of white people with their separate state organizations and schools of every grade from kindergarten to college for both races. Moreover, certain groups, like the Highlanders of the Southern Appalachians, call for separate consideration because of the special conditions under which they live. The study ought also to be undertaken with some just realization of the resources and progress of the southern states. Your Deputation, therefore, begins its report of impressions received with a brief account of what the words "the South" mean at the present time. Here and elsewhere in its report, the Deputation is greatly indebted to Rev. John M. Moore, D.D., Secretary of the Home Mission Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, whose recent book, "The South Today," is of peculiar value for our purposes, since it enables us to see southern conditions and problems through the eyes of a broad-minded man born in the South and identified with all that is best in its life and work. It should be added that Dr. Moore's statistics cover the sixteen states where slaves were held before the war, thus including Oklahoma and Missouri.. Although the geographical definition of "the South" thus offered contains territory not usually included and cannot

be regarded as satisfactory from most points of view, it answers the purpose of the preliminary portion of this report perhaps better than a more restricted definition would do. In the area thus bounded the population in 1910 was divided as follows:

White people of American parentage.

foreign birth...
"" parentage.

Negro population
Indian

20,643,613

927,386

1,687,065

8,781,215

110,000

32,149,279

The student of these sixteen states is therefore considering nearly one-third of the total population of the nation and much more than a third of those not foreign by birth or parentage. It should also be noted that these states contain about one-third of the white population of American parentage in the entire country. The region contains 925,028 square miles, which is a trifle over one-fourth of the total area of the United States.

However viewed, it is a section of large significance. Industrially, socially, politically, educationally, its problems and possibilities are of the gravest import to the nation and the world. Those responsible for the policy and program of any type of organized Christian effort cannot escape asking themselves with insistent earnestness what service they can render the South and what service the South can render to the ideals they cherish. The same thing can be said of any other important and measurably homogeneous section of our country. Dr. Moore justly remarks concerning his own study of the South:

"" As a component part of our common country, and not very different from the rest, the South is simply one of the units into which the national domain is divided by natural lines and normally developed conditions. This study is not meant to establish the independency, the separateness, the peculiarities, the unique capabilities, or the unusual needs of the South or its people, but to present a succinct yet informing statement of the present economic, social, and religious conditions of the people, the forces that are at work, and the seeming potentialities and tendencies of this vast and important section of the United States. A similar study might be profitably made of other sections, such as New England, the Northwest, or the Great Lakes region. The American people of today do not know their country, and it can no longer be studied as a whole."

It is with such view of the case that your Deputation has sought to assemble the facts and considerations which bear

upon the duty of the Congregational type of Christian thought and life in the South.

No one can travel through the South in observant mood without becoming conscious of the rapid progress which is being made in all fields of effort. This is so generally recognized that it does not call for extended illustration. A few figures showing the growth along industrial lines may be taken as indicative of what is happening in all lines. The estimated value of property in the South increased from $21,519,000,000 in 1904 to $43,473,000,000 in 1912. The growth in property valuations in the South for the period 1880-1912 was 378.8 per cent., the increase in the rest of the country being 317.6 per cent.

As illustrating the enormous economic advance of the nation in thirty-five years and the generous share of such advance found in the South, Dr. Moore says:

"The South has now $7,000,000,000 more capital invested in manufacturing, $108,000,000 greater value of mineral output, $866,000,000 greater value of farm products, is cutting 3,483,000,000 more feet of lumber, has a greater railroad mileage, and has $765,000,000 more banking resources and $225,000,000 more deposits in financial institutions than the whole country had in 1880. The South is cutting more than half the lumber in the entire country; it virtually monopolizes the cotton seed industry; it makes seventy per cent. of all the commercial fertilizers manufactured in the United States, having an annual value of $105,000,000; it mines practically all of the country's output of phosphate rock, sulphur, fuller's earth, pyrite and other basis materials, and it has in its beds seventyfive per cent. of all the coal in this country suitable for coke that is used in smelting."

In manufacturing, the growth of capital invested from $159,496,592 in 1860 to $2,855,375,275 in 1910 reveals the difference between the South of today and the South of antebellum days. Even more impressive are the facts concerning the cotton mill industry of the South. Quoting again from Dr. Moore:

"The South spins twice as much cotton today as the nation spun in 1880. She had 11,859,000 spindles in 1912 and has been increasing the number continuously, having added 454,804 in 1915. In 1909 the South's capital invested in cotton mills was about nine hundred million dollars. Massachusetts leads all the states in the number of spindles, having in 1910, 7,391,671, but South Carolina comes second with 3,760,891, North Carolina third, with 2,958,235, and Georgia fourth, with 1,774,967. The South uses in her mills more cotton than all the remaining states. Massachusetts in 1910 used 1,244,614 bales, North Carolina 754,483, South Carolina 690,834, Georgia 529,726. The United States consumes in the cotton mills about five million bales annually. The South's cotton crop in 1914 was seventeen million bales of about five hundred pounds each."

Turning from the economic to the educational and social development of the South, there will be found a similar spirit of progressiveness and the same notable results. Naturally and inevitably, however, this side of southern achievement has been obliged in some degree to wait upon economic gains. A region which is engaged in a desperate struggle to rebuild its ruined homes and factories cannot at the moment do all it might desire in recreating its social institutions.

How desperate that struggle was for the South in the years following the Civil War, the North has but dimly and unsympathetically realized. The tragic picture is thus drawn by Dr. Moore:

"The upheaval of the sixties not only wiped out five thousand million dollars' worth of their property, but it destroyed the capacity for rapidly creating wealth. They had to go in want of the enriching implements of a great civilization. They saw powerful educational institutions crowd the North, while their schools struggled and lived distressingly. They watched the growth of strong publishing houses in the North with their enormous output of great books, and the enlarging influence of fine Northern literary weekly journals and monthly magazines, while their own section went without them. They have not been unmindful of the marvelous Northern establishments with their command of wealth and their influence upon the national life. They have had to depend largely upon Northern capital to build their railroads and then sometimes endure harsh criticism because they were no better. But the Southern people have not been bitter, envious, nor ugly spirited. They loved and love the South with a devotion rarely known in any other people. They are wounded when it is criticized, but they know that criticism is possible if there are any who are inclined to expose their want and weakness. Many years will pass before there will be any large easy wealth in the South by which great philanthropy may be maintained and the needed higher institutions of learning may be established, equipped and maintained. Without them many who would avail themselves of the advantages which such institutions would afford must go lacking and only the few who can go North or East or abroad will be able to reach the great foundations of knowledge and power. These conditions will change as the nation's wealth, however held, becomes more and more available for the nation's South."

While the cramping conditions thus described are passing away, their pressure is still keenly felt. Even the rapid growth of industry which has been outlined entails burdens as well as confers benefits. On the one hand, a large amount of the profits are drained away to reward northern capital. On the other, the introduction of manufacturing centers into an agricultural region occasions serious social dislocations.

But a great company of men and women are laboring with clear vision and unselfish devotion to shape the relationships and institutions of the South into forms of beauty and power

and human helpfulness. They are developing the public school system, fighting disease, applying science to industry, promoting just race relations, building libraries, exterminating the saloon, reducing child labor, introducing prison reforms, broadening the program of the church, bringing light and power and healing to all the communities of the South. Their task is not an easy one. But they are forging ahead. They need all the help they can get. The question which Congregationalists should ask is, what can we do to help?

CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES AMONG WHITE POPULATION In considering Congregational interests in the South, group by group, we begin with churches which minister to white people. It may be said at this point that Congregationalists have accepted the custom and judgment of the South concerning the separation of the races in church life, as in other departments of community relationship. This is not mere deference to the sentiment of the region under discussion, but represents the deliberate view of our southern Congregational leaders of both races. In reaching this view they do not for a moment maintain that the matter of race relationships is in satisfactory shape either North or South. We are still at a depressing distance from the goal of brotherly feeling and brotherly helpfulness. But as things stand, such feeling and helpfulness will be far more rapidly promoted through separation into race groups, than by an attempt to mingle the two, which is certain to prove inoperative and disastrous.

White Congregational churches are found in all the southern states except Mississippi. Their number and location are as follows: