that can raise half of this sum in this way. A few years ago when Wilberforce University was heavily indebted and it seemed that it needed some one to rescue it, the State of Ohio proposed to buy the church portion of the institution; but the trustees, with the spirit of the progressive Negro, emphatically replied that the whole State of Ohio did not have enough money to buy Wilberforce. Rallying under the leadership of Bishop Joshua H. Jones, the African Methodists raised $50,000 in one year and cleared the institution of debt. In this changing order, moreover, when the white administrators of Negro schools find themselves deprived of the former financial support received from the North, they veer around to the position of southern white people, accepting and sometimes enforcing in Negro institutions themselves the unwritten laws of caste that the white management may curry favor with the prejudiced community. As these administrators must under such circumstances lose the support of the Negroes and experience has not yet shown that many southern white men will make sacrifices for Negro education, the institutions in the hands of such misguided white friends of the Negro will probably suffer. CHAPTER XIII THE NEGRO CHURCH SOCIALIZED The Negro church as a social force in the life of the race is nothing new. Prior to emancipation the church was the only institution which the Negro, in a few places in the South and throughout the North, was permitted to maintain for his own peculiar needs. Offering the only avenue for the expressional activities of the race, the church answered many a social purpose for which this institution among other groups differently circumstanced had never before been required to serve. It was, in the first place, a center at which friend looked forward to meeting friend, contact with whom was denied by the rigorous demands of slavery. It was then a place of enlightenment through the information disseminating from the better informed or by actual teaching in the Sunday school. It served often as an outlet for expression of the Negro social mind, now for a renewed determination to break their chains through prayer, then to resort to concerted action on the basis that he who would be free must himself first strike the blow.