Abstract
Prior to World War II, the black sub-culture had been in stolid isolation from the rest of the country for as long as Blacks had been in America. The black world was a cosmos apart, seldom penetrated from the outside except by the white mercantilists, and largely left to the development of its own cultural profile through the instrumentality of its own peculiar devices. The organizing matrix was the Black Church, which, curiously enough, had never been one church but many, and ecumenism had never been a salient feature of the black experience.