African-American Churches
African-American churches emerged and expanded dramatically during the 19th century, first in the North and then in the South. These churches combined west African and evangelical Protestant elements in a crucible shaped by enslavement, discrimination, and poverty to produce unique religious forms.
The First Colored Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia, 1794. African Americans of the 19th century increasingly formed independent congregations and, eventually, denominations.
Early slaves resisted Christianity as alien, and efforts by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to convert them faltered for lack of missionaries and an emphasis on doctrine. But African Americans proved receptive to the evangelical impulses of the mid-18th and 19th centuries, for its experientialism, egalitarianism, emphasis on emotionally expressive lay preaching, and ecstatic audience participation coincided with west African tradition and counteracted white discrimination. Baptists and Methodists in particular attracted blacks and encouraged them to preach, and by 1790 the Methodists reported that nearly a fifth of their 60,000 converts were “colored.” Baptist numbers were probably higher. The Second Great Awakening accelerated this trend.
In Northeastern cities, where abolition after the American Revolution allowed significant religious autonomy, free black Methodists formed separate congregations and denominations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In Philadelphia, lay preacher and former slave Richard Allen (1760–1831) founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794, and in 1816 met with representatives of black congregations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland to form the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Spreading through the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, it grew to more than 20,000 members by 1860.
In New York, black congregations joined in 1821 to form the rival African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church, which remained smaller than the AME Church—its membership was about 5,000 by 1860—but was politically active and included many leading black abolitionists. Black Methodists meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1815 formed a third denomination, the Union Church of Africans.African Americans of other denominations formed separate institutions as well. Black Baptist congregations appeared in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia by 1809, and by the 1830s began combining into regional associations. In Philadelphia, black Episcopalians formed a congregation in 1794, and Presbyterians did likewise in 1807. All of these institutions promoted racial identity and were central to the social, political, economic, and cultural life of Northern, free, urban, black communities. Many actively promoted abolitionism and migration along the Underground Railroad.
Church formation was more problematic in the South until after the Civil War. Some slave owners permitted separate slave worship in local chapels, and a number of black congregations—mostly Baptist, with some Methodist and Presbyterian—developed in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Some urban Baptist churches became quite large: Gillfield, in Petersburg, Virginia, had 441 members in 1821, and Charleston’s First African claimed more than 2,400 by 1830. But most African-American congregations were short-lived, and whites curtailed autonomous black gatherings after Christianity’s implication in the Denmark Vesey (1822) and Nat Turner (1831) slave rebellions. Most Christian slaves attended integrated but white-dominated churches, most of which were Methodist since the denomination actively promoted plantation missions, and its silence on the slavery issue before 1844 (when the denomination split along sectional lines) made its preachers welcome on plantations. Many slaves also practiced a covert and distinctive form of worship—characterized by enthusiastic preaching, spirituals, and a call-and-response format reminiscent of west African practices—often called the “invisible institution.”
Emancipation and Reconstruction sparked the growth of existing black denominations and the formation of new ones.
During the Civil War, many blacks left the white Methodist Episcopal Church, South for the AME and AMEZ churches, which had moved into the South in the wake of Union Army advances. By war’s end in 1865, the AME church had grown to more than 50,000 members and the AMEZ to more than 30,000; by 1896, those numbers had expanded to about 450,000 and 350,000, respectively. Other freed slaves resisted the Northern black churches and established indigenous Southern denominations, often by separating from white organizations. Colored Primitive Baptists and the African Union First Colored Methodist Protestant Church organized in 1866; in 1869, blacks formed the Reformed Zion Union Apostolic Church, and the Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church split off from its white counterpart; the Colored (later Christian) Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church broke away from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1870; the Colored Presbyterian Church from the mainline Presbyterian Church in 1874; in 1885, a group of Southern blacks left the Northern-dominated AME church to form the Independent African Methodist Episcopal Church. Finally, in 1895, black Baptist associations nationwide merged in Atlanta into the huge National Baptist Convention (NBC). Ministers in these churches often promoted racial consciousness, many participating actively in Reconstruc-tion politics and some, like AME bishop Henry Turner (1834–1915), advocating migration to Africa. Black churches also sent missionaries to blacks in Africa and the West Indies. By 1990, four of nineteen AME districts were in Africa.
Not all African Americans of the 19th century embraced evangelical Protestantism. In Maryland and Louisiana, many slaves accepted their owners’ Catholicism, and migrations from Maryland to Kentucky in the late 18th and early 19th centuries included many black Catholic slaves.
French-speaking migrants to New Orleans and Baltimore from politically unstable Saint Domingue (Haiti) beginning in the 1790s further augmented those numbers (as has 20th-century Caribbean migration to New York and Florida). Other Afro-Caribbean migrants from Saint Domingue to New Orleans brought voodoo, which combined west African traditions of dance and spirit possession with ritual Catholic candles, altars, and prayers. The most direct African religious importation to America, it flourished in New Orleans by 1850, and its healing practices spread throughout the slave South as hoodoo. Still other blacks retained the Islam to which they had been exposed in Africa. But the mid-1990s figures—5 million in the AME, AMEZ, and CME churches, and 12 million in the descendants of the NBC—suggest the continuing dominance of evangelical Protestantism in African-American religion.