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During antebellum America, a hush harbor was a place where enslaved African Americans would gather in secret to practice religious traditions. [1]
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(September 2014) |
During antebellum America, a hush harbor was a place where enslaved African Americans would gather in secret to practice religious traditions. [1]
Religion grew to become a highly respected part of slave life. It offered the enslaved hope and reassurance. Slaves were forced to organize and conduct these meetings in secret because the idea of slaves assembling without supervision left the owners in fear. The meetings were held after dark, once field and house chores were completed, and carried on late into the night. [4] [5] [6]
Christianity was the prominent religion of the African Slaves after being transported to the Americas. After being exposed to Christian ideas, the slaves began to understand them more. Slaves discovered promising stories and passages in the Bible that offered hope. The story of Jesus Christ suffering on the cross drew attention because of the similar, harsh treatment they both received. [7] [8] [9]
The hush harbors served as the location where slaves could combine their African religious traditions with Christianity. It was safe to freely blend the components of each religion in these meetings. [10] The slaves could let go of all their hardships and express their emotions. Here is where Negro spirituals originated. The songs created by slaves were known to contain a double meaning, revealing the ideas of religious salvation and freedom from slavery. The meetings would also include practices such as dance. African shouts and rhythms were also included.
Slaves would suffer punishments had they been caught in a hush harbor meeting. Slave owners were confident that they would compare treatment, working conditions, and punishments, leaving them worried about revolts and riots. African American churches taught that all people were equal in God's eyes. Instead the African American church focused on the message of equality and hopes for a better future. [11]
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (W. E. B. Du Bois) studied African-American churches in the early twentieth century. Du Bois asserts that the early years of the Black church during slavery on plantations was influenced by Voodooism. [12] For example, an oral account from an African American in the nineteenth century revealed that African Americans identified as Christian but continued to make and carry mojo bags to church and practiced Hoodoo and Voodoo. As time progressed, many African Americans became more Christian and less influenced by African religions. [13] [14]
The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant religious revival during the early 19th century in the United States. The Second Great Awakening, which spread religion through revivals and emotional preaching, sparked a number of reform movements. Revivals were a key part of the movement and attracted hundreds of converts to new Protestant denominations. The Methodist Church used circuit riders to reach people in frontier locations.
Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs that were created by enslaved Africans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities, Christianity and elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure man or conjure woman, root doctors, Hoodoo doctors, and swampers. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include conjure or rootwork. As a syncretic spiritual system, it also incorporates Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims and Spiritualism. Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion. Folk religions are syncretic traditions between two or more cultural religions, in this case African indigenous spirituality and Abrahamic religion.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South was the American Methodist denomination resulting from the 19th-century split over the issue of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). Disagreement on this issue had been increasing in strength for decades between churches of the Northern and Southern United States; in 1845 it resulted in a schism at the General Conference of the MEC held in Louisville, Kentucky.
African diaspora religions, also described as Afro-American religions, are a number of related beliefs that developed in the Americas in various nations of the Caribbean, Latin America and the Southern United States. They derive from traditional African religions with some influence from other religious traditions, notably Christianity and Islam.
The black church is the faith and body of Christian denominations and congregations in the United States that minister predominantly to African Americans, as well as their collective traditions and members. The term "black church" can also refer to individual congregations.
Africanisms refers to characteristics of African culture that can be traced through societal practices and institutions of the African diaspora. Throughout history, the dispersed descendants of Africans have retained many forms of their ancestral African culture. Also, common throughout history is the misunderstanding of these remittances and their meanings. The term usually refers to the cultural and linguistic practices of West and Central Africans who were transported to the Americas during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Africanisms have influenced the cultures of diverse countries in North and South America and the Caribbean through language, music, dance, food, animal husbandry, medicine, and folklore.
Approximately 15.3% of Americans identify as Baptist, making Baptists the second-largest religious group in the United States, after Roman Catholics. Baptists adhere to a congregationalist structure, so local church congregations are generally self-regulating and autonomous, meaning that their broadly Christian religious beliefs can and do vary. Baptists make up a significant portion of evangelicals in the United States and approximately one third of all Protestants in the United States. Divisions among Baptists have resulted in numerous Baptist bodies, some with long histories and others more recently organized. There are also many Baptists operating independently or practicing their faith in entirely independent congregations.
Religion of black Americans refers to the religious and spiritual practices of African Americans. Historians generally agree that the religious life of black Americans "forms the foundation of their community life". Before 1775 there was scattered evidence of organized religion among black people in the Thirteen Colonies. The Methodist and Baptist churches became much more active in the 1780s. Their growth was quite rapid for the next 150 years, until their membership included the majority of black Americans.
Solomon Bayley was an African American freed slave who is best known for his 1825 autobiography entitled A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave in the State of Delaware, North America. Published in London, it is among the early slave narratives written by slaves who gained freedom before the American Civil War and emancipation. Bayley was born into slavery in Delaware. After escaping and being recaptured, he later bought his freedom, and that of his wife and children. He worked as a farmer and at a sawmill. In their later years, he and his wife emigrated in 1827 to the new colony of Liberia, where he worked as a missionary and farmer. His short book about the colony was published in Delaware in 1833.
Louisiana Voodoo, also known as New Orleans Voodoo, is an African diasporic religion that originated in Louisiana, now in the southern United States. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional religions of West Africa, the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, and Haitian Vodou. No central authority is in control of Louisiana Voodoo, which is organized through autonomous groups.
Albert Jordy "Al" Raboteau II was an American scholar of African and African-American religions. Since 1982, he had been affiliated with Princeton University, where he was Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion.
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South is a book written by American historian John W. Blassingame. Published in 1972, it is one of the first historical studies of slavery in the United States to be presented from the perspective of the enslaved. The Slave Community contradicted those historians who had interpreted history to suggest that African-American slaves were docile and submissive "Sambos" who enjoyed the benefits of a paternalistic master–slave relationship on southern plantations. Using psychology, Blassingame analyzes fugitive slave narratives published in the 19th century to conclude that an independent culture developed among the enslaved and that there were a variety of personality types exhibited by slaves.
The Silver Bluff Baptist Church was founded between 1774-1775 in Beech Island, South Carolina, by several enslaved African Americans who organized under elder David George.
First Baptist Church was the first Baptist church in Petersburg, Virginia; one of the first African-American Baptist congregations in the United States, and one of the oldest black churches in the nation. It established one of the first local schools for black children in the nation.
Gillfield Baptist Church is the second-oldest black Baptist congregation in Petersburg, Virginia and one of the oldest in the nation. It has the oldest handwritten record book of any black church. It was organized in 1797 as a separate, integrated congregation. In 1818 it built its first church at its current lot on Perry Street.
Invisible churches among enslaved African Americans in the United States were informal Christian groups where enslaved people listened to preachers that they chose without their slaveholder's knowledge. The Invisible churches taught a different message from white-controlled churches and did not emphasize obedience. Some slaves could not contact invisible churches and others did not agree with an invisible church's message but many slaves were comforted by the invisible churches.
The Negro in the South is a book written in 1907 by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and educator Booker T. Washington that describes the social history of African-American people in the southern United States. It is a compilation of the William Levi Bull Lectures on Christian Sociology from that year. Washington and Du Bois had recently co-contributed to the Washington-edited 1903 collection The Negro Problem.
Caesar Blackwell (1769–1845) was an enslaved African-American preacher in Alabama, one of a number of black preachers in the South who preached to a mixed congregation. He was either bought or freed by the Alabama Baptist Association, and preached in the Antioch Baptist Church in Montgomery County, Alabama.
Racial segregation of churches in the United States is a pattern of Christian churches maintaining segregated congregations based on race. As of 2001, as many as 87% of Christian churches in the United States were completely made up of only white or African-American parishioners.
Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (1887) is an anthology of 177 short biographies of African-American men written by Rev. William J. Simmons, a Baptist minister and college administrator. The book has been called the "single most authoritative work on nineteenth-century African Americans". Henry McNeal Turner, a noted African Methodist Episcopal minister and leader, wrote the introduction.
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