58

Baltimore, tended to attract larger numbers of poorer workers from a more
recently rural background. The hundred or so small store-front and home-based
congregations that Ira Reid and his fellow researchers felt were impossible to
survey were undoubtedly made up overwhelmingly of the most marginalized, most
recently-rural, and most religiously traditional African American Protestants in the

These differences of social composition should not be overstressed, however,
for the Baltimore Black community was overwhelmingly poor and working class (as
will be shown below) and all of the larger congregations had significant proletarian
memberships. The mixed class composition of even the largest churches is clear
from the fact that, in the early 1930s, only 1/4 to 1/3 of the congregations of most
churches, especially the largest, could afford to financially contribute on a regular
basis. Hence differences and indeed contradictions based on class and regional
origin cropped up within as well as between churches and often appeared as
complex oppositions between more rationalistic and socially-oriented religious
practices on the one hand, and more evangelical and chiliastic forms on the
other.35

These class contradictions coincided with and reinforced generational
tensions in the churches to produce, by the late 1920s, what Ira Reid dubbed the
"revolt of the youth." This was a passive revolt in part: attendance at the Sunday
schools and youth fellowship activities was relatively meager and declining. It was
also an active revolt, with many of the younger people, particularly those who were
high school educated and more influenced by the "New Negro" cultural movement,
openly rejecting what they saw as stodgy traditionalism, "back country" teaching,
"negative morality," and lack of political consciousness in many of the churches.
And these and other tensions with Black Protestantism were exacerbated at the end
of the 1920s, as economic difficulties - even before the Crash - left the churches in
increasingly bad financial straits.3**