Both white and Negro clergymen agree that the development of separate churches was inconsistent with the teachings of religion, but the Negro clergymen were adamant, feeling that a separate church would give them an opportunity to develop leadership. More, there were theological points that Negro churchmen found difficult to accept. One was the notion, widely held among white Christians particularly in the South, that the Negro was the descendant of Ham, the son of Noah, who laughed at his father’s nakedness and thus doomed himself and his descendants to be hewers of wood and drawers of water--that is to say, servants--to the descendants of Noah’s other sons. This theological justification for the concept of Negro inferiority reached its peak during the early part of the nineteenth century, when a spurious body of anthropological and biological scholarship offered “scientific proof” of the Negro’s innate inferiority both as a spiritual being and as a person. It was the “Linnaean Web” that did it: scientists at that time completely embraced the notions of Linnaeus that the classification of peoples in terms of skull sizes and shapes as well as in terms of color was the first step toward knowledge. The American scene of the early 1800s was peopled with a variety of racial stocks, and the majority of the white Protestant group fell victims of the all-too-easy temptation to judge the worth of an individual merely by looking at the color of his skin or the shape of his nose. Thus, the image of the hook-nosed Jewish peddler; the drunken, shiftless Irishman; the stupid, soggy German; the hot-tempered Italian; and the ragged, lazy Negro. Only in the Negro church, then, did the Negro find a sense of dignity and meaning. Only there was he made to feel a true and equal child of God. The Negro church developed a peculiar theology that spoke to the frustration of the American Negro, and it was there that the Negro translated Christianity into the hope of Negro deliverance. But two factors, hardly noticed at the time, were to keep the Negro church from becoming a completely closed institution: first, the Negro church was a part of the Negro community, which was an affront to every sensitive Negro citizen; the Negro community was an enclave of terror and police brutality, and the growing ambition of every Negro was somehow to escape this troubled land and live out his days in a less menacing atmosphere. The other factor that operated against the Negro church was its consuming concern with the salvation of souls, the readying of men for full and total adjustment in the world beyond the grave. Like its white counterpart, the Negro church neglected the social ethic, was unconcerned about where men would live, what they would eat, and how they would clothe themselves on this side of the Jordan.