Observers noted their ability to excite congregations to the point of frenzy. They might memorize Bible passages heard in a white church and recite them with an original pacing designed to build the audience's tension. Any black religious leader faced a careful balance between tenants of faith and the comfort of whites.Ĭommonly illiterate, black preachers, particularly slaves, used sharp memories, cadence, imagery, and drama in their sermons. A few found a place among the most influential white leaders in their denomination. Among free African American preachers was the drive to build new congregations through a peripatetic life.

Some enjoyed less hard labor, better food and clothing, and a lifestyle distinct from fellow bondpeople. Those preachers with white support might travel among farms and plantations preaching to whites and blacks. The slave preacher often faced slave owners who worked to eradicate religion in the quarter and provided particularly harsh punishment for preachers. Many other whites saw in their efforts the threat of servile insurrection. True believers in the white community encouraged them, sometimes openly, but often quietly. Their existence forged a host of contradictions and filled their lives with a special kind of danger.

Communities of faith were anchored by their prayer meetings and ministrations. They mediated among Christian ideals, African religions and community values, and slavery's stark reality. By whatever title, with or without permission, license, or a slave owner's consent, these preachers propagated their faith, cared for their followers, and preached their inclinations across almost two centuries of American slavery.īlack preachers in and around the slave community were the founders of African American Christianity. Some received licenses to preach, some were assistants to white ministers, and others preached because they felt spiritual compulsion. They were variously ministers, preachers of the Gospel, exhorters, deacons, watchmen, medicine men, and prayer leaders. Slave and free black Christians who spread their religion went by many names with different meanings. One former slave speaking of early-nineteenth-century camp meetings recalled, 'Mostly we had white preachers, but when we had a black preacher that was heaven' (Sernett 1975, p. Late-eighteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism opened opportunities for both free and enslaved African Americans to profess and develop their faith. 'The most illiterate among them are their Teachers even Negroes speak in their meetings,' claimed an Anglican missionary disturbed by New Light Baptists in Virginia (Raboteau 1978, p.

Raboteau slave religion