se in 1875 in the formation of "The New England
Baptist Missionary Society." Each enlarged its borders until the two
embraced the greater part of the whole country. In 1880 the Negro
Baptists of the country formed their first national society to do work
in foreign lands exclusively. The organization constituted at this
time took the name, "The Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the
United States."

In 1886, at St. Louis, Missouri, the National Baptist Convention was
formed, and the work of this organization was subsequently so modified
that in it is unified all the national and international church work
in which Negro Baptists of America were engaged. These efforts toward
organization, however, were not altogether satisfactory, for the
Baptists soon developed a factional struggle in regard to the question
as to independent action or cooperation with the American Baptist
Foreign Mission Society and the American Baptist Home Mission Society.
In 1897, in the Shiloh Baptist Church, Washington, D. C., the Lott
Cary Baptist Foreign Missionary Convention was formed by certain
churches in the Atlantic States which looked with disfavor on the
independent mission work as conducted by the Foreign Mission Board of
the National Baptist Convention. Composed chiefly of men and women who
were educated in the schools of the American Baptist Home Mission
Society, this organization has from the first cooperated with Northern
Baptists in the prosecution of its work.

At Chicago in 1915 there arose a more serious division in the forces
of the National Baptist Convention as the result of differences of
opinion in regard to the ownership of the Convention in the lands and
chattels of its Publishing Board. As a result of these differences
there have developed two groups of colored Baptists in this country,
engaged in similar work, and each claims to be the National Baptist
Convention--the original and only National Baptist Convention of Negro
Baptists in America.

One of the results of the association of Negro churches has been
education. Negro Baptists in a land of slavery were not supposed to be
versed in the knowledge of books. But inasmuch as master and slave
were instructed out of the same inspired writings Sabbath after
Sabbath, the slave quite frequently was as familiar with the Bible as
his master. Ignorance and illiteracy are not one and the same thing.
An unlettered people may be learned in the word of God, and being made
wise