Slavery and Religion

• After importing slaves to the New World, slave owners isolated slaves from their fellow countrymen in order to lessen unity and erase any identity as Africans. Part of a slaveholder's program of instilling obedience in slaves was compelling their attendance at church services, where a minister would preach on slave obedience, using an example of an escaped slave being told it was his Christian duty to return to his master from the Biblical book of Paul. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s, new denominations swept the south, including Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. Slaves, forbidden from reading, were drawn to the evangelical style of worship of the Great Awakening that emphasized private emotion and experience over doctrinal fidelity. Despite the slaveholders' attempts to use Christianity to compel obedience, slaves held their own worship meetings, often in secret since the content of slave services, such as spirituals, were often subversive of white rule. Historians like Eugene Genovese and Albert Raboteau have argued that slaves' private religious beliefs, while not necessarily leading to overt rebellion, created a strong slave community and maintained a hope for freedom in the afterlife.
  
  

Free Black Churches in the North

• During the antebellum era, free blacks in the North created their own churches as a reaction against the prevalent segregation in northern Protestant churches. Denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Church were an important source of African-American leadership, especially of the abolitionist movement.
  
  

Post-Civil War African-American Religion

• After the Civil War, Southern African-Americans brought their worship meetings into the open and created their own churches, much as free blacks in the North had done in the mid-19th century. The church was the central institution in African-American communities.
  
  

Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

• The central role of churches and clergy within the black community was true of the Civil Rights Movement as well. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., rose to prominence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and was a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, an organization of clergymen who helped lead the Civil Rights Movement. Their religious beliefs inspired the tactic of non-violence, which Civil Rights activists used successfully in challenging the legalized segregation in the South.
  
  

Other Trends in the History of African-American Religion

• Other religious trends in religious black history include the rise of nationalism in the 1960s, concurrent with the growing prominence of African-American Islam. In some areas of the southern United States, as in Louisiana, a mix of traditional African religions and Christianity, like vodoo, have persisted since the colonial era.