People, Locations, Episodes

The Black Church In America, a story

*This Registry dates from 1758 and briefly describes the history of the Black Church in America. This institution was the first source of land ownership for black African slaves in America and is viewed as the reason and savior of oppressed African people in the United States.

During the decades of southern slavery in America, slave associations were a constant source of concern to slave owners. For many members of white society, Black religious meetings symbolized the ultimate threat to white existence.  Nevertheless, African slaves established and relied heavily on their churches. Religion offered a means of catharsis... Africans retained their faith in God and found refuge in their churches. However, white society was not always willing to accept the involvement of slaves in Christianity. As one slave recounted, "The white folks would come in when the colored people would have a prayer meeting and whip every one of them. Most of them thought that when colored people were praying, it was against them”.

Religious exercises of slaves were closely watched to detect plans for escape or insurrection. Black churches showed an air of militancy in the eyes of white Americans. Insurrections such as Nat Turner's in Virginia, born out of the religious inspiration of slaves, horrified white Americans. Understanding the potential end that could result from the religious experiences of African slaves, many white Americans opposed the participation of Blacks in Christianity. In African American history, "the church" has long been central to black communities. It has become the most significant Black religious enrichment and secular development source.

This development is embodied in Christianity, and the term "the Black Church” presents many details of racial and religious lifestyles unique to Black history.  In essence, the term "the Black Church" is a misnomer. It implies that all Black churches share the same aspirations and strategies for creating cohesive African American communities. This is untrue; numerous black community differences were reflected within their churches.

Black communities differed from region to region. They were divided along social lines, composed of persons from different economic levels, and maintained varying political philosophies. Black communities in the inner cities of the United States have traditionally differed from those in rural areas, etc. In The Negro Church in America, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier noted, "Methodist and Baptist denominations were separate church organizations based upon distinctions of color and what were considered standards of civilized behavior."

Organized politically and spiritually, Black churches were not only given to the teachings of Christianity but were faithfully relied upon to address the specific issues that affected their members.  For many African American Christians, black Churches have always represented their religion, community, and home regardless of denominational differences. Scholars have repeatedly asserted that Black history and Black church history overlap to be virtually identical. One of the First known Black churches in America was created before the American Revolution, around 1758. Called the African Baptist or "Bluestone" Church, this house of worship was founded on the William Byrd plantation near the Bluestone River in Mecklenburg, Virginia. Africans believed that only adult baptism by total immersion was doctrinally correct.

Black people in America also supported the autonomy of their congregation in making decisions independent of the larger church bodies. Other early Black Church milestones included the Baptist and Episcopal denominations. The First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia, began in 1777. This is said to be the oldest Black church in North America. Originally called the First Colored Church, the pastoral life of George Leile’s preaching is tied to its beginning.

In 1787, Blacks in Philadelphia organized the Free African Society, the first organized Afro-American society, and Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were elected as overseers. They established contact and created relationships with similar Black groups in other cities.  Five years later, the Society began to build a church dedicated to July 17, 1794. The African Church applied for membership in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. The end of the Confederacy signaled freedom for millions of southern Black slaves and prompted the emancipation of the Black church. This started the emergence of the Black church as a separate institution.

Many Black churches discreetly doubled as stations on the Underground Railroad.  At the time, white southerners still sought to maintain control over African Americans' worship for religious and social reasons.   Such services typically emphasized the responsibility of the slave to be obedient and provided biblical justification for Black bondage. Slaves had no voice in church affairs and were relegated to the rear of the church or the gallery as spectators rather than full congregation members.

After emancipation, Black churches became virtually the only place for African Americans to find refuge. Blacks moved away from the "hush harbors" they retreated to for solace as slaves. During this time, thirty-eight black members of the predominantly white Fairfield Baptist Church in Northumberland County, Virginia, filed a church separation petition in 1867. Referring to the new political and social status of Blacks, the petitioners said they wanted to "place ourselves where we could best promote our mutual good" and suggested" a separate church organization as the best possible way. A month later, the white members of the church unanimously acceded to the petitioners' request, setting the stage for the creation of the all-black Shiloh Baptist Church.

Once established, Black churches spread rapidly throughout the South; the Baptist churches led in this proliferation. The 1800s ushered in many millstones built on the Black Church's foundation. To mention just a few, 1808 celebrated the founding of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City.  Black Americans and a group of Ethiopian merchants were unwilling to accept racially segregated seating at the First Baptist Church of New York City.  They forever withdrew their membership and established themselves in a building on Anthony Street (later Worth Street) called the Abyssinian Baptist Church. The name was inspired by the nation from which the merchants of Ethiopia had come, Abyssinia.

Other new churches also emerged because of the missionary activities of Black ministers. The Reverend Alexander Bettis, a former South Carolina slave, organized more than forty Baptist churches between 1865 and his death in 1895. Also, in 1881, Canada stretched the church's funds, setting into motion a union between the AMEC and the British Methodist Episcopal Church (BMEC), ratified at a BMEC convention held at Hamilton in June 1881.

Services: With the division of congregations came a distinct religious observance combining African rituals, slave emotionalism, southern suffering, and individual eloquence. Working-class Baptist and Methodist church services fused African and European forms of religious expression to produce a unique version of worship that reflected the anguish, pain, and occasional joy of nineteenth-century Black life in the United States.

Such services usually involved a devotional prayer, a leading church member singing by the congregation and choir, and the minister's sermon. The prayer would request a mighty God to ease the congregation's earthly burden and would be enhanced by the congregation's response, an expression of agreement with the words "Yes, Lord," "Have mercy, Lord," and "Amen."

After the prayer, the congregation typically showed their devotion through song. Even if a formal choir existed, all the congregation members would be expected to participate. Occasionally, an individual member outside the choir would stand up and lead the house in song. By the turn of the century, most southern Black church choirs had assumed the responsibility for presenting the hymns, but the "call and response" tradition continues today.

The third element in a classic Black service was the minister's sermon. Building on the long tradition of slave preachers and "exhorters," many ministers employed all the drama and poetry at their command, injecting vivid imagery and analogy into their biblical accounts, conveying an understanding of the rewards of righteousness and the wages of sin. Not every minister was capable of eliciting such a response. But those ministers who did avoid "emotion without substance" and stirred their congregations to strive for a more profound faith and more righteous way of living in a world of adversity provided spiritual guidance for a people whose faith and capacity for forgiveness were tested daily.  For these people, the Black church was truly "a rock in a weary land."

Nineteenth-century Black churches ministered to the soul's needs and served various secular functions, which placed them squarely in the center of Black social life. Church buildings doubled as community meeting centers and schools until permanent structures could be built, and during Reconstruction, they served as political halls. The Black church provided visitors shelter, temporary community theaters, and concert halls where religious and secular plays and programs were presented.

In a blurring of spiritual and social functions, church members provided care for the sick or incapacitated and financial assistance to students bound for college. They also sponsored virtually all the fraternal lodges in the nineteenth-century South. As racially motivated violence and terrorism ran rampant nationwide, Black churches were staunch in their resistance.

In 1886, Blacks organized the National Baptist Convention to continue reducing the influence of white national bodies among Blacks. As the number of Baptist churches grew, they met regularly in regional conventions that evolved into statewide and national organizations. By 1895, the various Baptist associations had formed the National Baptist Convention of America, representing 3 million Black Baptists, primarily in the South.

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church emerged as the second-largest post-American Civil War Black denomination. Because of its independence, the AME Church had always been suspected in the Antebellum South, forced out of South Carolina following the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822. Bishop Daniel Payne reorganized the church in South Carolina in 1865 and grew to forty-four thousand members by 1877. Similar growth in other southern states gave the AME Church, by 1880, national membership of four hundred thousand followers for the first time concentrated in the South.

Other denominations completed the spectrum of Black church organization in the South. The Colored Methodist Episcopal (now Christian Methodist Episcopal) Church grew from the Black parishioners who withdrew in 1866 from the predominantly white Methodist Episcopal Church, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church each claimed two hundred thousand members by 1880.

In 1895, more than 2000 clergy attended a meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The three largest conventions of the day, the Baptist Foreign Missionary Convention, the American National Baptist Convention, and the National Baptist Educational Convention, merged to form the National Baptist Convention of the United States of America. This brought both northern and southern Black Baptist churches together. Among the delegates was Rev. A.D. Williams, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and grandfather of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

However, the more involved Black Churches became in sparring against the racial intolerance and violence targeted against them, the more the churches and their members were punished. Within the church, the Presbyterians and Episcopalians also saw the division of their memberships into white and Black denominations, with each of the two Black churches having some one hundred thousand members by 1900.

1908 The Christian Index published the "Colored Methodist Bishops' Appeal to White America-1908." In their statement, church leaders responded to the surge of mob violence and lynching occurring across the country, denouncing  Jim Crow laws and terrorism waged against Blacks and imploring the country to suppress the spread of anti-Black violence. As anti-Black terrorism proliferated into the twentieth century, Black churches grew increasingly vehement in their calls to castigate racial violence. Also, on September 15, 1915, the National Baptist Convention of America was formed.

Between World War I and World War II, the Black church continued to be not only an arena of social and political life for Black leaders; it had a political meaning for the masses. Although they were denied the right to vote in the American community, within their churches, especially the Methodist Churches, they could vote and engage in electing their officers. The election of bishops, other officers, and representatives to conventions has been a severe activity for the mass of blacks in America.

Almost a century ago, the Black church was an organizational site for social and political activities and a center for economic development and growth. As microcosms of the larger society, Black churches provided an environment free of oppression and racism for African Americans.  In Black churches, African Americans were consistently exposed to social, political, and economic opportunities that all members could seek and have equally. The symbolic structure of African American churches confirmed Black preachers as religious and community leaders. The sermons of many Black preachers expounded messages of Christianity analogized to the daily experiences of Blacks. Thematic expressions of overcoming oppression and "lifting while climbing" were first articulated in church sermons.

20th Century Civil Rights Era:

During the last centuries of the American Civil Rights era, Black churches were well-established social and political power bases for African Americans. Their enormous presence naturally sanctioned them with the political power to lead Black people in the movement for civil rights. Some churches and their organizations were completely opposed to this political struggle.  Others participated passionately, organizing rallies, protests, and marches while teaching Christianity and community involvement.

In the late 1940s, 50s, and ’60s, the Black Church functioned as the institutional center for Black mobilization. They provided an organizational base and meeting place for African Americans to strategize their moves in the ongoing fight against racial segregation and oppression. As Black Churches became an epicenter of the social and political struggles for Black equality, they increasingly became targets for racially motivated violence. An extensive assault on members of a Black community took place by burning a Black Church.

The bombing and burning of Black churches during this time translated into an attack upon the core of civil rights activism and the larger Black religious community. The most infamous example of racist American church destruction occurred on September 15, 1963. When the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was firebombed, the entire Black community felt the explosion. Four children were killed in the attack, several others were injured, and a community's sense of security within their church was forever traumatized.

This act signified the depths to which racial hatred could fall. Like many other churches bombed before and after, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was a Black Church. Even though the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was implicated in this crime, members of the KKK were not the only ones responsible for similar acts of terror throughout the country. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. These racially motivated arsons did not destroy the souls of Black communities. In 1988, the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America was formed.

In the 1990 C. Eric Lincoln book The Black Church in the African American Experience with Lawrence H. Mamiya. They described the "seven major historic Black denominations: the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church; the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church; the National Baptist Convention, USA., Incorporated (NBC); the National Baptist Convention of America, Unincorporated (NBCA); the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC); and the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)," as comprising "The Black Church."

In the twenty-first century, the Convention movement of the African American Baptist Church has undergone several changes. The individual organizations remain essential to African American religious life. The Black Church is also at a crossroads due to 'WhiteFlight," gentrification, and systemic capitalism. The Black Church has historically been a source of hope and strength for the African American community.