This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Daniel Payne's own memoir, Recollections of Seventy Years, records an encounter as a young minister that his first article, concerned with the school he closed and the university he later led, never touches: coming upon a ring shout, a call and response circle dance with clapping and stamping already rooted in rural Black worship, and telling the group to stop, a documented pastoral intervention distinct from the institution building his first article traces. Payne recorded that a fellow preacher defending the practice warned him that suppressing it risked driving members from the church, a documented internal disagreement distinct from the external, state imposed obstacle, the 1834 law closing his school, his first article describes him facing.
Payne held his position anyway, arguing across his ministry that decorous, literate worship centered on scripture served the denomination better than practices he associated with slavery's past rather than the church's future, a consistent theological stance distinct from the specific argument for an educated clergy his first article credits him with institutionalizing at Wilberforce. The disagreement was never simply generational; it set one of the AME Church's own bishops against worship forms many congregants had brought from the rural South.
That the same bishop remembered for building Black higher education from a closed schoolhouse also spent decades arguing, against resistance from his own preachers, that a specific inherited form of worship should be set aside, marks Payne's stance on the ring shout as a documented case where his lifelong argument for formal education carried directly into a dispute over how Black congregations should pray.