Chapter Eight Summary and Analysis

Chapter Eight discusses the church and the Negro. The ministers helped to pull the blacks together as a community. The pastors saw their role as people who helped the black community transform the mind and the spirit of the former slave into someone with a sense of racial pride. The pastors wanted to help the black man to achieve his full potential and understand politics. They saw the needs of the black Americans: work, land, schools, housing, and equality under the law.

The black American needed the vote. Many of the women understood the need to vote more than the men. They denied marital joys for a long while to someone who was lazy about getting to the voting booth.

As the Southerners saw the influence that the ministers had over the freedmen, they added more rules to be...