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Keep your hand on the plow--hold on: black Baptist women in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: as I look about me today in this veiled world of mine, despite the noisier and more spectacular advance of my brothers, I instinctively feel and know that it is the five million women of my race who really count.

Article Excerpt
Black women (and women whose grandmothers were black) are ... the main pillars of those social settlements which we call churches and they have with small doubt raised three-fourths of our church property. (1)

W.E.B. DuBois used these words to describe the importance of black women in the life of the black church. Although his statement did not refer to a specific denomination, it aptly described women in the black Baptist church today as well as yesterday. Black women represent a preponderance of its membership, financial strength, and missionary force. (2) Black Baptist women, in the wake of racial and gender discrimination, have long contributed to the advancement of both the black church and black community.

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview of the history of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; to examine the roles of its black church women; to understand the creation of women-centered organizations; and to explore the strides made by black women as members of the clergy and to appraise attitudes toward them. In doing so, we will see that Ebenezer's black women have followed the great spiritual injunction and have kept their hands on the plow and held on.

Ebenezer Baptist Church is the oldest black Baptist church in Pittsburgh. Early in 1874, a group of ten black Christians, eight men and two women, gathered for weekly prayer meetings each Wednesday night at the home of Mary A. Kendall. (3) When the intensity of these gatherings and prayers increased, a church was organized, and Henry Marshall was installed as its first pastor on August 10, 1875. As the church rapidly took form, so did the exclusion of black women. For example, the earliest deacon board had four male members, and the trustee board was comprised of five men. The superintendent of the Sunday School and the church clerk were also men. Thus, in Ebenezer Baptist Church's early years, every leadership position was held by a man. The exclusion of women happened despite the fact that the founding of the church included the active participation and leadership of two women: Eliza Fisher and Mary Kendall.

During the pastorates of Ebenezer's first seven ministers, only five women were ever chosen to represent the church at various conventions. (4) The women were relegated to the traditional roles of church women: raising funds, assisting the pastor, singing, praying, teaching Sunday School, caring for the sick, and training children--all duties which were within the traditional woman's sphere. (5) Nonetheless, the women were crucial to broadening the public arm of the church, making it the most powerful institution of racial self-help in the black community. (6)

In 1915, when J. C. Austin, a graduate of Temple College and Virginia Theological Seminary and College, assumed the pastorate, the roles of Ebenezer women began to change significantly. Three factors contributed to the changing roles: a speech delivered by Nannie Burroughs at the National Baptist Convention in September 1900 entitled "How the Sisters are Hindered From Helping"; Austin's growing ministry; and the onset of the Great Migration in 1914. (7)

Burroughs, who was responsible for and should be credited for changing the status of women in black Baptist churches across the country, resented the exclusion of women from leadership roles in the church. The response to her speech led to the founding of the Women's Convention, an auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, (8) which emerged partially in resistance to an already established male hegemony within the church. (9) This sisterhood of more than 1 million Baptist women began to assert itself by setting its own agendas in the national convention and in churches.

Austin's popularity as the new pastor of Ebenezer led to rapid growth of the congregation; and the Great Migration, which brought hundreds of thousands of southern black migrants to Pittsburgh, also influenced the changing roles of black Baptist women. Given the influx of black female migrants into the church and the demands these women made and given the need to satisfy the calls for change being made by long-time female church members, the church was forced to reevaluate the role of its women.

Women-Centered Organizations...