RELIGION

African American religion in America, conceived against a background of slavery and segregation, gave the African American man an opportunity to be free while in chains.

African Americans produced a gospel of future hope and a theology of the suffering servant. African American religion is unique to African American folk and it ties them to each other in times of stress by a racial hood which cuts across all other variables.

A chronology of African American religion links it with the coming of Christianity to Egypt, 354-543 A.D., thus to the West Coast of Africa, on to America via the slave ships. Early Colonial law decreed only non-Christians as slaves. When slaves were found to he Christians, the law was changed.

At first, benevolent slave owners permitted slaves to practice religion, baptizing those who had not been baptized. Slaves generally worshiped in a segregated section of the white church attended by the owner. This pattern of segregation prompted many African Americans to organize their own congregations. During the American Revolution, and prior to the great slave rebellions which later put a ban on the formation of African American churches, several large Baptist congregations were established. The first was founded in Silver Bluff, South Carolina, in 1773. Between 1776-1786, Baptist churches were organized in Virginia at Petersburg, Richmond and Williamsburg. In Savannah, Georgia, George Liele founded a Baptist congregation for African Americans in 1779. Under the pastorship of Andrew Bryan, a slave, the first Baptist church was built for African American worshippers in 1796.

African American churches grew out of the expulsion of African American worshippers from the white churches. Without schools or social centers, the African American churches became focal points for community activities, and from the churches emerged distinguished leaders:

RICHARD ALLEN, 1760-1831, Church Founder and Bishop, was born a slave in Philadelphia. Allen lead (and with ABSALOM JONES) founded the movement to organize the Free African Society—forerunner of the present institution of African American insurance companies. Allen also founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1787) and made the African American church into an institution in 1816. Jones organized the first Episcopal congregation among African Americans in 1794. Denouncing colonization in Africa, Allen started the first national movement for resettling free African Americans in Canada (1830). (Read More)

JAMES VARICK helped lay the foundation for the AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ZION CHURCH, and became its first Bishop in 1882.

JOHN CHAVIS, a brilliant, unmixed African American, educated at Princeton, was made a missionary to the slaves by the PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH in 1801.

LEMUEL HAYNES was licensed to preach in the CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH in 1780.

In 1782, "BLACK HARRY", (Reverend Harry Hosier) became an assistant to the first Bishop (white) of the METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH in the U.S.

African American ministers worked with the various abolitionist groups in the underground railroad movement, and mere active workers in the Convention Movement. They were spokesmen for the free African Americans in the North. Influential in African American leadership from the pulpit were such men as:

• Alexander Crummel
• Henry Highland Garnet
• Daniel Payne
• Henry McNeal Turner
• J.W.C. Pennington
• Benjamin Tucker Tanner

Many prominent African American ministers were educators:

• John Chavis organized a prep school and taught white pupils in his native South Carolina:
• Benjamin Mays (born 1895) was president of Morehouse College from 1940-1967
• Bishop Isaac Lane founded Lane College (TN),
• Daniel Payne was the first African American president of Wilberforce (OH).

Black ministers in the early 19th Century became involved in African recolonization efforts. One of these, the Baptist Lott Cary, went to Liberia in 1821 where he worked until his death seven years later.

MAJOR AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS GROUPS