The Negro's church,.

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The Negro's Church

four cities are not so much overchurched as poorly churched.
In these four cities, the problem is largely that of reducing greatly the enormous number of store-front and house
churches and increasing slightly the number of churches constructed for church purposes; but there is also the further
problem of properly locating churches.
The Baptists Also Lead in the Number of Churches in the
North
As in the South, the Baptists lead. Of the 1,029 churches
in the five northern cities, 466, or 45.3 per cent., are Baptist.
The African Methodist Episcopal churches do not, as in the
South, rank second, but the Holiness churches, with 244, or
23.7 per cent., of the 1,029. In the North, the Spiritualist
churches take third place. The African Methodist Episcopal
ranks fourth, having 77 churches in five cities, or 7.5 per
cent. of the churches; and the Methodist Episcopal churches
which were in fourth place in the South, are in the fifth place.
The Colored Methodist Episcopal, along with the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion, ranks sixth in the North and fifth
in the South.
Negroes in the North More Highly Churched Than Whites
In Baltimore, Negroes make up 17.7 per cent. of the population, and have 21.5 per cent of the churches. They are
slightly more churched than the whites.7 If they had as few
churches as the whites, there would be 145 Negro churches
in Baltimore and not 186. Baltimore has 677 white churches
and a white population of 662,768. The Negro population
is 142,106.
' Data as to the number of white churches were obtained from the Executive Secretary of the Federation of Churches or from the City Directory after
all Negro churches had been located and the number compared with the
number found in the City Directory. If the directory was approximately
correct in the number of Negro churches, it was assumed that it was equally
correct in the number of white churches.