The Missionary Era · c. 1770s-1906 · United States
The Black Church in America
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
Before the Civil War most Black Christians in America worshipped under white supervision. And made something else of it anyway, in praise houses, brush arbours and night meetings where the preaching, the singing and the theology were their own. Independent congregations appear from the 1770s (Silver Bluff in South Carolina, First African Baptist in Savannah in 1788), and in 1816 Richard Allen, who had walked out of a Philadelphia Methodist church with the rest of its Black members after a trustee pulled Absalom Jones up off his knees in the segregated gallery, organized the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first Black denomination of national reach; AME Zion followed in 1821. Because the law in much of the South forbade the enslaved to read, the tradition's theology comes down to us largely in what it sang and told: the spirituals, conversion accounts, and self-published narratives like Jarena Lee's. By 1906 it was a whole world of its own. Denominations, colleges, newspapers and a worship life that was about to reshape global Christianity from a mission on Azusa Street.
In Its Own Record
Formed From
- The Baptists — The Black Baptist congregations (Silver Bluff c. 1773-75, First African Savannah 1788) are the Baptist parent line of the Black Church. Edge written at the Era 9 Freeze (Mark, 2026-08-03).
- The Methodist Revival — Richard Allen’s AME (1816) and AME Zion (1821) are Methodist bodies — the Methodist parent line of the Black Church. Edge written at the Era 9 Freeze (Mark, 2026-08-03).
Sources
- Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors (pub. 1833); the 1794 yellow-fever vindication pamphlet (with Absalom Jones); AME Doctrines and Discipline (1817) and General Conference minutes; Daniel Coker, A Dialogue between a Virginian and an African Minister (1810) (primary) — The founding bishop's own narrative and the church's own records from the start.
- Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836; expanded 1849); Zilpha Elaw, Memoirs (1846); Julia Foote, A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879) (primary) — Black women preachers' own narratives (Lee self-published, with Allen's authorization recorded in her own words), collected in Andrews's Sisters of the Spirit.
- Slave narratives as primary religious texts: Douglass, Narrative (1845, with the appendix on slaveholding religion); Sojourner Truth, Narrative (1850 - dictated); God Struck Me Dead (Fisk interviews, 1920s); WPA ex-slave narratives (1930s) (primary) — These narratives carry real editorial filters: abolitionist framing, dictation rather than self-authorship in some cases, and interviewer bias. The Fisk and WPA interviews were recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, decades after the events they describe.
- Spirituals as communal theology: Slave Songs of the United States (1867) and the Fisk Jubilee Singers' repertoire; with David Walker, Appeal (1829) and The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831, recorded by Thomas R. Gray) (primary) — The spirituals survive here through white transcription and concert-stage arrangement, both real filters on the original oral form. Walker's Appeal is a direct work of Black prophetic writing. Turner's Confessions were recorded by Thomas R. Gray, a white lawyer, from a captive man facing execution - a hostile and coercive context for the text.
- Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion (OUP, 1978; updated 2004), with Milton Sernett (ed.), African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Duke, 2nd ed. 1999) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 22 'Christian America' and 'Christian Canada' (Noll) (reference) — This reference volume has no dedicated chapter on the Black church; chapter 35 (Kalu) touches on the Atlantic diaspora as related context.