The black church remains a vital element in the black community today, and the importance of the black church was established in the ante-bellum South. Religion was important to the blacks brought to this country as slaves, for they had their own religion in their native land and fused elements of that earlier tradition with the Christian tradition they found here. The blacks in Africa who were captured and brought to America as slaves also had a developed and developing culture, and those who were enslaved were removed from that culture and thrust into a very different world where they were slaves rather than masters. They brought elements of their own culture with them, and some of these elements persisted in spite of the different location and the efforts of slave-owners to eliminate them. The Native Americans were Christianized by white settlers, and black slaves were Christianized by slave-owners. Religion was an excuse for challenging the earlier culture in both cases as something pagan and dangerous. Just as white settlers found ways to justify their actions toward the Native American, so did slave-owners and others find ways to justify slavery. From the point of view of the slaves, however, their church would become a source of strength, support, and community.
The primary community center for the black population was the church, as the account of slave John Cameron from Jackson, Mississippi noted:
Us Niggers didn' have no secret meetin's. All us had was church meetin's in arbors out in de woods. De preachers 'ud exhort us dat us was de chillun o' Israel in de wilderness an' de Lawd done sent us to take dis lan' o' milk an' honey (Rawick, 1972, 8-9).
This community could be broken up by selling slaves from one plantation to another, of course, but in the larger sense the community was always present and was connected--all plantations had their church as a center for the black community, a center not provide...