At least one church organized by Alrican Americans existed prior to the Declaration of Independence, and free blacks established a few churches in northern cities in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Slave owners, however, discouraged the establishment of black churches, sensing the inherent threat of assembly and fearing the emphasis that enslaved African Americans might place on God’s support of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Nevertheless, African-American slaves embraced evangelical Protestantism and its encouragement to express their feelings by shouting, singing, and dancing, a helpful coping mechanism for their frustrating existence and lot in life. More important, the promise of salvation, of a release from an earthly hell to an eternity of heavenly freedom, offered
African-American slaves an immeasurable reward. During the Gilded Age the appeal of evangelical Christianity remained powerful, since freedom from slavery did not bring political, economic, or social equality. Life for blacks remained difficult, the practice and promise of evangelical Christianity still had its rewards, and the proliferation of African-American churches provided bases for improving life in the here and now.
Baptists
African slaves, who arrived in America as Muslims or followers of traditional African religions, slowly accepted Christianity. The Baptists converted many enslaved persons during a period of great Baptist growth from 1750 to 1850. Slaves usually attended white churches, where they were segregated in separate pews or excluded in a hidden balcony commonly known as “nigger heaven.” The first black Baptist church was organized in 1775 by David George at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, near Savannah, Georgia, but most black Americans were unable to have their own churches in the early years of the 19th century as whites sought to use religion to control them. Many enslaved persons, however, wanted their religious experience to reflect their African and, later, their African-American cultures and traditions. They stole off to canebrakes or woods to worship early in the morning away from the watchful eyes of owners, overseers, or night patrols. Blacks organized Baptist churches in the North, notably the Jay Street Baptist Church (originally known as African Meeting House) in Boston in 1805 and the Abyssinian Baptist Church in lower Manhattan in 1808.
Black Baptist churches flourished after the Civil War as former slaves left the white churches to organize their own. Their growth was enhanced by the establishment of colleges with the assistance of white religious bodies. Many of these historically black colleges were seminaries for the training of ministers and teachers. Among the earlier black seminaries were Wayland Seminary (Virginia Union University) and Raleigh Institute (Shaw University), both founded in 1865. They were followed by the establishment of Augusta Institute (Morehouse College), 1867; Benedict College, 1870; Natchez Seminary (Jackson State University), 1877; Florida Baptist Institute (Florida Memorial College), 1879; and Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary (Spelman College), 1881.
Each Baptist congregation is independent and selects pastors and other church officials. This autonomy helped the Baptist church to spread in the South and elsewhere as African Americans migrated to points North and West. In 1895 the American National Baptist Convention and the Tripartite Union merged to form the National Baptist Convention, U. S.A. (NBC). Two years later the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention was organized by dissatisfied parties within the NBC who eschewed white support for mission work. Both became active participants in the African mission field. Among mainstream denominations, the Baptists were more apt to be encouraged by the church’s leadership to express themselves emotionally in worship. The vast majority of African-American Protestants are members of the Baptist Church.
African Methodist Episcopalians (AME)
Next to the black Baptists, the AME Church is the largest African-American denomination in the United States. Richard Allen was the founder of this denomination. Allen was born a slave in Philadelphia in 1760. He preached to black worshipers in St. George Methodist Episcopal Church until a desire for a church of their own and a racial altercation led to his ejection from a “white” pew, which caused him and his followers to build Bethel AME Church in 1794. The AME Church was incorporated in 1816 with Allen as its first bishop. African Methodism spread to New York, New England, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and the Ohio Valley. Prior to the Civil War, congregations were established in Kentucky, Missouri, and Louisiana. Many churches were founded in the Midwest by missionary Paul Quinn. Other missionaries brought the church to California. During the 1820s a mission was established in Haiti.
At the end of the Civil War, James Lynch and James D. S. Hall were the first two missionaries commissioned to convert the newly freed slaves. In May 1865 Bishop Daniel A. Payne—assisted by Theophilus G. Steward, James A. Handy, and James H. A. Johnson—reestablished the church in South Carolina. (It had been banned in 1822 when African Methodists were implicated in the Denmark Vesey insurrection.) From April 1865 to May 1866 about two-thirds of black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, set up their own churches outside of that denomination. Like the Baptists, many African Methodists took control of church buildings that they had built as slaves for white Christians. To their credit, many whites cooperated and allowed the former slaves to take charge of the buildings. African Methodism spread rapidly to North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and into the Southwest due to the missionary spirit of African Methodist Civil War chaplains Henry M. Turner, David Stevens, Garland H. White, and William H. Hunter as well as AME soldiers.
Like the Baptists, the AME Church established seminaries and colleges to train ministers. Among them were Wilberforce University (1856), Allen University (1880), Morris Brown College (1881), Paul Quinn College (1881), and Kittrell College (1886). The British Methodist Episcopal Church, which was organized after splitting from the AME Church in 1856, reunited with the mother church in 1884, adding congregations in Canada, Bermuda, and British Guiana. Bishop Henry M. Turner organized churches into conferences in Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1891 and five years later in South Africa. Between 1890 and 1916 the AME Church grew from 494,777 members to 548,355, and the number of churches increased from 2,481 to 6,636.
African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ)
There were few independent black churches in the late 18th century, when black members of the John Street Methodist Church in New York City felt the sting of racial discrimination. In 1796 Peter Williams and William Miller started a separate congregation. From 1816 to 1824 black Methodists moved to establish a separate denomination. In 1816 a separate circuit was established for African Methodists with a petition from Zion Church and Asbury Church to the Methodist Episcopal Conference of New York. In 1820 they formed a separate conference within the Methodist Episcopal body, but in 1821 they rejected an affiliation with the AME Church. In 1824 the AMEZ conference declared its independence from the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Like other black denominations, the AMEZ Church gained members during the Civil War as its missionaries followed black soldiers. Bishop Joseph J. Clinton commissioned James Hood and others to conduct mission work in the South during and after the Civil War. In the 1870s and following decades, the AMEZ extended mission work to the Midwest, the Far West, Canada, the Caribbean, and Africa. While smaller in numbers and congregations than either the black Baptists or the AME Church, the AMEZ Church made remarkable strides from 1821, when it counted 1,400 members and 22 ministers. By 1871 membership had increased to nearly 400,000. Like other black denominations, the AMEZ used its seminary, Livingstone College, in North Carolina, to train ministers for mission work in Africa. Throughout the late 19th century until the present, Africans have attended Livingstone College, where they further their education to assist in the African mission field.
Further reading: Paul E. Johnson, ed., African-American Christianity: Essays in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1990); William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Albert J. Raboteau, African-American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
— William Seraile
World History
