page_title: Black church
section_title: Slavery
hierarchical_section_title: Black church / History / Slavery
caption_attribution_description: English: View from the southeast of African-American Baptist Church, Silver Hill Plantation, Friendfield Estate, Georgetown vicinity, Georgetown County, South Carolina. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
context_page_description: The term Black church refers to the body of churches that currently or historically have ministered to predominantly African American congregations in the United States, as well as their collective traditions and members. The term can also refer to individual congregations.
  While some Black churches belong to predominantly African-American Protestant denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, many Black churches are in predominantly White Protestant denominations, such as the United Church of Christ. There are also many Catholic Black churches.
  Most of the first Black congregations and churches formed before 1800 were founded by free Blacks – for example, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Springfield Baptist Church; Petersburg, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia. The oldest Black Baptist church in Kentucky, and third oldest in the United States, was founded about 1790 by the slave Peter Durrett. The oldest Black Catholic church, St Augustine in New Orleans, was founded by free Blacks in 1841.
  After slavery was abolished, segregationist attitudes towards Blacks and Whites worshiping together were not as predominant in the North as compared to the South.
context_section_description: Evangelical Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled throughout the South in the Great Awakening of the late 18th century. They appealed directly to slaves, and a few thousand slaves converted. Blacks found opportunities to have active roles in new congregations, especially in the Baptist Church, where slaves were appointed as leaders and preachers. (They were excluded from such roles in the Anglican or Episcopal Church.) As they listened to readings, slaves developed their own interpretations of the Scriptures and found inspiration in stories of deliverance, such as the Exodus out of Egypt. Nat Turner, a Baptist preacher, was inspired to armed rebellion, in an uprising that killed about 50 White men, women, and children in Virginia.
  Both free blacks and the more numerous slaves participated in the earliest black Baptist congregations founded near Petersburg, Virginia, Savannah, Georgia, and Lexington, Kentucky, before 1800. The slaves Peter Durrett and his wife founded the First African Church (now known as First African Baptist Church) in Lexington, Kentucky about 1790. The church's trustees purchased its first property in 1815. The congregation numbered about 290 by the time of Durrett's death in 1823.
  Following slave revolts in the early 19th century, including Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, Virginia passed a law requiring black congregations to meet only in the presence of a white minister.  Other states similarly restricted exclusively black churches or the assembly of blacks in large groups unsupervised by whites. Nevertheless, the black Baptist congregations in the cities grew rapidly and their members numbered several hundred each before the Civil War. (See next section.) While mostly led by free blacks, most of their members were slaves.
  In plantation areas, slaves organized underground churches and hidden religious meetings, the "invisible church", where slaves were free to mix evangelical Christianity with African beliefs and African rhythms. With the time, many incorporated Wesleyan Methodist hymns, gospel songs, and spirituals. The underground churches provided psychological refuge from the white world. The spirituals gave the church members a secret way to communicate and, in some cases, to plan a rebellion.
  Slaves also learned about Christianity by attending services led by a white preacher or supervised by a white person.  Slaveholders often held prayer meetings at their plantations. In the South until the Great Awakening, most slaveholders were Anglican if they practiced any Christianity. Although in the early years of the First Great Awakening, Methodist and Baptist preachers argued for manumission of slaves and abolition, by the early decades of the 19th century, they often had found ways to support the institution.  In settings where whites supervised worship and prayer, they used Bible stories that reinforced people's keeping to their places in society, urging slaves to be loyal and to obey their masters. In the 19th century, Methodist and Baptist chapels were founded among many of the smaller communities and common planters. During the early decades of the 19th century, they used stories such as the Curse of Ham to justify slavery to themselves. They promoted the idea that loyal and hard-working slaves would be rewarded in the afterlife. Sometimes slaves established their own Sabbath schools to talk about the Scriptures. Slaves who were literate tried to teach others to read, as Frederick Douglass did while still enslaved as a young man in Maryland.
caption: African American Baptist Church, Silver Hill Plantation, Georgetown County, South Carolina
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