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Black Church, The
Reference to the more than 65,000 Christian churches, which have a predominance of African American members and black clerical leadership; the Black Church has served as a major institutional foundation of African American spiritual and community life.The Black Church emerged from the period of slavery as the most stable and dominant institutional sphere in black communities in the United States. This centrality of religion was achieved through a gradual historical process that involved several factors. First, prior to and during the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the traditional worldviews and societies of the Africans themselves were permeated by religion, with no division between sacred and secular, especially between religion and politics. The Africans who were brought as slaves to the New World came as human beings, already socialized in their own African traditions and values. It is estimated that between 10 and 15 percent of the slaves came from Muslim-dominated parts of Africa or areas that were undergoing the transition to Islam.Early Influences
While there has been a debate about how much of the traditional African religious culture or African Islam survived in the New World, there has also been a consensus that a homegrown, indigenous African American culture—a fusion of elements from Africa, Europe, and the United States—was created during the several centuries of slavery and the period of Jim Crow segregation that followed it. A second important factor in the development of the institutional centrality of black churches involved the great ambivalence among white colonists toward religion and toward the conversion of slaves. Religious groups, such as the Puritans, who were seeking the freedom to practice their religion without persecution, founded most of the early colonies. Although Native Americans and Africans were viewed as subhuman, various groups were pressing for their conversion. As early as 1667, the Virginia colony passed laws, which other colonies followed, that permitted the baptism and conversion of African slaves without setting them free. In 1701 the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, one of the earliest organizations to begin missionary efforts among the slaves and Native Americans, was formed. But it was not until the early decades of the nineteenth century, during the Second Great Awakening—a national religious revival—that many of the slaves were converted. While some slaves were converted to Christianity in the North during the Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century, it was the Second Great Awakening, in the early nineteenth century, that swept through the plantations of the South, bringing with it an emotional, evangelical form of Protestant piety that was adopted by Baptists and Methodists. But for most whites, Christianity was largely viewed as an instrument of social control, to produce obedient and docile slaves.Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution
While the social control aspects of Christianity were quite effective when intermeshed with other constraints—such as laws and black codes, illiteracy, and an omnipresent threat of extermination—religion became the only institutional area in which African slaves also exercised a measure of freedom, despite the many efforts to hinder or control their religious life. Sometimes stealing off to the backwoods and bayous of southern plantations, or meeting clandestinely in the slave quarters, and at times even openly in services with whites present, they performed their own rituals, songs, and other cultural forms of religious worship. They also developed their own leaders so that the “invisible institution”—an underground slave religion—could effectively merge with the rise of institutional black churches in the latter half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a consequence of these historical factors, religion among black people became the only institutional area that was permitted to develop to any significant degree. During several centuries of slavery, political, economic, educational, and other cultural and social institutions were deemed illegal and remained relatively undeveloped. Finally, as the only significant social institution other than the black family, the Black Church took on multiple roles and burdens that differed from its white counterpart.
The R Street Baptist Church This image of the R Street Baptist Church in Washington DC was part of the American Negro Exhibit during the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Library of Congress
Library of Congress
First Black Churches
Emerging from the invisible institution of slave religion, the first known black churches emerged before the American Revolution (1775–1783), with the African Baptist or Bluestone Church on the William Byrd plantation near the Bluestone River in Mecklenburg, Virginia, in 1758, and the Silver Bluff Baptist Church on the South Carolina bank of the Savannah River, founded sometime between 1750 and 1775. These first churches were of Baptist origin, which meant that they believed that only adult baptism and baptism by total immersion in water were doctrinally correct. They also supported a congregational polity that asserted the autonomy of a congregation to choose its own pastor and to make its decisions independent of any larger association. Early Baptist preachers George Liele, Andrew Bryan, and Jesse Peters (also called Jesse Galphin) were instrumental in founding the Springfield Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, and the First African Baptist and First Bryan Baptist churches of Savannah, in 1782 Georgia. Liele went to Jamaica with British troops from Savannah, and established the first Baptist churches there.Philadelphia's New African Churches
While the Baptists founded the first black churches, it was the Methodists who organized the first black denominations, which also became the first national associations for African Americans. In 1787 former slaves Richard Allen and Absalom Jones established the Free African Society of Philadelphia, a mutual aid and benevolent society that assumed both secular and religious functions. Allen, Jones, and several black worshipers had withdrawn from the Saint George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia after being pulled from their knees during worship in a gallery they did not know was closed to black Christians. According to Allen, “All went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with [us] in that church.” Two black churches rose out of the Free African Society. By 1794 Allen had turned an old blacksmith's shop into a church that would eventually become the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, while Absalom Jones became the rector of the Saint Thomas African Episcopal Church in 1794.New York's First Black Church
In New York City, similar incidents of racism and segregation during worship, where blacks were forced to sit in the upper galleries or in back pews, led black members to withdraw from the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church near Wall Street. Peter Williams, Sr. and Francis Jacobs of New York City, and James Varick of Newburgh, New York, helped to establish a new African church. Jealousy and competition for new members resulted in the inability of both black Methodist movements on the East Coast to unite in one body. Methodists adhered to a connectional polity where a bishop appointed pastors to churches, and they also believed in a symbolic baptism of sprinkling water on the head rather than full immersion.
Black Philadelphian Richard Allen (1760–1831), dismayed by the racist treatment he encountered at a mostly white church, purchased the building that became the Bethel African Church in 1794.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Methodist Churches
The central questions of the full ordination of black preachers as clergy, the election of blacks as bishops (episcopacy), the desire to worship in their own cultural style, and the issues of black independence and control of their own religious institutions finally led to the establishment of two black Methodist denominations. In 1816 the Allenites of Philadelphia and Baltimore established the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) as a denomination and elected Richard Allen as its first bishop. The Reverend Daniel Coker became the first AME missionary to Africa in 1820. The New Yorkers founded a separate denomination also called the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1821, led by Bishop James Varick. They would later add the word Zion to become the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Both denominations also became the institutional base of an incipient middle class of free blacks. The AME Church distinguished itself in the field of education when it reincorporated Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1863 under the guidance of Bishop Daniel Payne, its first president. While the AME also participated in the abolitionist movement with Richard Allen, using Mother Bethel as a hiding place for escaped slaves in the Underground Railroad, it was the Zionites who became the leaders of abolitionism. Long known as the Freedom Church, AME Zion claimed such abolitionary luminaries as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Reverend Jermain Loguen, Catherine Harris, Reverend Thomas James, and Fredcerick Douglass, who was licensed as a local AME Zion preacher in Rochester, New York. The Zion denomination was also the first of all Christian denominations, black or white, to extend the vote and full clerical ordination to women in 1898. Although both the AME Church and the AME Zion Church originated as Northern black denominations, during the Civil War (1861–1865) they also sent missionaries to follow the Union Army's march through the South and recruit blacks and their churches to their fold. As a result, South Carolina has the most AME churches and North Carolina has emerged as the AME Zion stronghold.Christian Methodist Episcopal Church
In 1844 the issue of slavery split the Methodist Episcopal Church into Northern and Southern branches. In 1866 the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South—in response to the twin pressures of blacks who wanted autonomy and whites who wanted to dispense with the black membership—made arrangements for the eventual withdrawal of its black constituents at their petition. The third black Methodist denomination, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America, was founded in 1870 by bishops William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst. Headquartered in Jackson, Tennessee, the denomination replaced the term Colored with Christian in 1954.Baptist Churches
Although they had the earliest churches and the largest constituency of African American congregants, the black Baptists did not organize a national denomination until 1895, when the National Baptist Convention, USA (NBC, USA) was established. Its first president was the Reverend E. C. Morris. The principle of congregational autonomy and the charismatic force of strong-willed pastors, however, led to a number of denominational schisms. In 1897 the Lott Carey Foreign Missionary Convention broke away. The NBC, USA experienced splits twice more in the twentieth century, once in 1915 with the formation of the National Baptist Convention of America in a dispute over the control and ownership of a publishing house in Nashville, Tennessee, and again in 1961 with the organizing of the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC). The PNBC arose out of disagreement over the proclaimed lifetime tenure of President J. H. Jackson and the denomination's participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Led by the Reverend Dr. Gardner Taylor, the supporters of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., challenged the status quo of the NBC, USA and eventually withdrew to form their own more politically progressive denomination.Pentecostal Movements
In his last memoirs, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed that the attainment of spiritual perfection was possible in this life. This belief fueled the quest of the Holiness/Pentecostal movement among blacks and whites that emerged in 1867 from the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness. Holiness members believed that a second blessing of the Holy Spirit (experience of sanctification), was required beyond the act of individual salvation (being saved). This blessing was manifested in a cathartic emotional experience that left some believers rolling in spasms on the floor (falling out), while others engaged in the uncontrollable movements of the holy dance. In the quest to become more holy, a rigid and disciplined lifestyle evolved. Among African Americans, the Holiness/Pentecostal movement also became the major carrier of black folk cultural practices that middle-class Baptists and Methodists attempted to discard in their desire to achieve the order and decorum in worship services like that of their white counterparts. More foot stomping, hand clapping, tambourine banging, and shouting occurred in the emotional cauldrons of the so-called sanctified people. The Great Migration of blacks to Northern cities in the twentieth century also gave rise to numerous sanctified church storefronts in northern cities, with such names as the Fire Baptized Holiness Church. Since the sanctified churches also allowed horns, guitars, drums, and other musical instruments into their services, they also became the musical training grounds for many African American blues and jazz musicians. There was a dynamic interaction between the storefront church and the nightclub. For example, learning to play the piano in church, Thomas Dorsey, or Georgia Tom as he was known on the nightclub circuit, eventually brought the blues back to the churches in the form of gospel music in the 1920s.
Preacher The Rev. Charles O. Campbell stands at the pulpit at his church in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879.
Library of Congress
Library of Congress
Church and Community Development
As the most educated and best trained in leadership skills, black clergy emerged as the prime leaders of black communities nationwide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only in religious matters but also in the secular spheres of politics, economics, education, and sociocultural activities. During the period of slavery, efforts at liberation and abolitionism were often led by religious leaders, as exemplified by the three largest slave revolts in American history, namely those revolts led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800 in Richmond, Virginia; Denmark Vesey in 1822 in Charleston, South Carolina; and Nat Turner in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. Black churches were not only used as secret meeting places to plot slave uprisings, but they also served as stops on the Underground Railroad. With the end of the black franchise in Southern states in the late nineteenth century, black people continued to vote in their churches, electing bishops, preachers, deacons, and other church officers. During the Reconstruction period (1865–1877), the phenomenon of the preacher-politician arose with the election of the first black senator, the Reverend Hiram Revels of Mississippi; and congressman, the Reverend Richard Cain of Georgia. The pattern of the preacher-politician continued throughout the twentieth century, for example, the election of such notable figures as congressmen Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., William Gray, John Lewis, and Floyd Flake, as well as the presidential campaigns of the Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. Both black and white politicians have also discovered the value of speaking at political forums at black churches during election campaigns to mobilize the black vote. During the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, black churches provided many of the leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Churches also served as places to mobilize for the movement, because the buildings were the only ones large enough to accommodate mass meetings in the highly segregated urban and rural areas of the South.Economic Development
In the economic sphere, black churches have been involved in economic development enterprises and in creating economic institutions. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1907, the study of “economic cooperation among Negroes must begin with the Church group.” Beyond the economic cooperation required in building the churches themselves, other economic projects were created. In 1866 five lay leaders of the Bethel AME Church in Baltimore, Maryland, pooled their funds to develop the first black-owned dry dock company and joint stock institution after black ship caulkers were fired because whites had protested their job competition. After the collapse of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in 1874 (Freedman's Bank), which resulted in the loss of the bounties paid to black Civil War soldiers and the savings accounts of many black people, the churches helped to develop some fifty black-owned banks beginning in 1888 and lasting until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Together with the financial resources of fraternal lodges and mutual aid and burial societies, the churches also helped to create the first black life insurance companies, such as the North carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, and the Afro-American Industrial Insurance Society of Jacksonville, Florida. A highly segregated society resulted in the creation of parallel institutions by African Americans. In the late twentieth century black churches have become the largest builders and sponsors of housing, pooling federal, state, and private funds. The 5,000 single-family, mixed-income dwellings of the Nehemiah Houses of East Brooklyn, New York, are one example.Education
Even more than economic projects, black clergy and churches have always viewed education as the key to upward mobility in American society. Churches have often doubled as schools, beginning with church school on Sunday morning for children and adults. The first lessons in reading and writing often occurred in Sunday school. Morehouse College began as a school in the basement of the Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, while Spelman College was founded in the basement of the Friendship Baptist Church of Atlanta. Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University also began in a one-room shanty adjacent to the AME Zion Church in Tuskegee, Alabama. Just as Harvard and Yale were founded for the education of the clergy, the curricula of many of the best black colleges, such as Fisk and Howard universities, were steeped in religious and moral instruction. All of the black denominations founded their own schools and seminaries.In addition to serving as places of worship, black churches have also performed other functions. The first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was started by the Reverend Samuel Cornish in 1827. The first speeches or musical recitals in public for black children occurred in the sanctuaries of black churches. Black artists often exhibited their work in the dining halls of the churches because the public art museums and private galleries were closed to them. The true genius of the Black Church, however, resides in the fact that it has given status, dignity, and respect to common people who were often invisible in American society.See also American Revolution; Baptists; Civil War, American; Pentecostalism.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
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