Southern Louisiana had its distinctiveness; complete with the French and Spanish legacy, an Anglo-American territory, its Roman Catholic bastion; present was evangelical Protestantism, the slave society, its sugar society and historic plantations. But more important it had Centerville, Louisiana, the hometown of William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves.
Centerville lays one-hundred miles southwest of New Orleans, on current US 90. Here one experiences a small rural area along the Bayou Tech, part of St. Mary’s Parish, “Hoodoo country,” Louisiana! Even today’s National Register of Historic Places testifies to St. Mary Parish’s former glory as it has twenty-seven historic plantation homes and other buildings listed on the 2011 list.1 But
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The institution was throughout Louisiana including St. Mary’s Parish. Historical statistics reveal that the slave population in the sugar parishes (excluding New Orleans) mushroomed from under 10,000 in 1810 to more than 42,000 by 1830. 8 There were fourteen sugar parishes in Louisiana; St. Mary’s had more large slaveholders than any other sugar parish. It was number five out of forty-seven parishes when lumped together with sugar, cotton and piney woods parishes.9 In 1860 St. Mary’s Parish was rated first of all of the sugar parishes in the number of slaves, being 13, 057 and less than 3,500 whites.10 Also it was first in the number of acres of improved acreage and upper echelon of the number of slaveholders and the number of landholders.11
Catholic slave masters ruled the majority of the slave plantations in Louisiana, but there was a noticeable disconnect between the nominal Catholic preference of slave masters and their actual practice of Catholicism. This being the case in St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana, which had four Catholic churches in 1860 capable of seating fourteen hundred persons, church attendance was low. Catholic planters put plantation duties before religious ones. The Catholic Church was not sufficiently appealing or necessary to them to warrant a trip to
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Nationally, in 1787, blacks broke away from the Methodist Church and in 1815 the African Methodist Episcopal (A. M. E.) Church was founded. By 1846, the A. M. E. Church, had grown to about 300 churches with over 17,000 members. They had 176 clergy.14
Methodism operated in both the state-at-large and in New Orleans. By 1847 there were thirteen Methodist appointments with 1,328 white and 1,280 Negro members in New Orleans alone.20 In Louisiana, the circuit system was at work and by 1850 there were more Methodist churches in Louisiana than any other church denomination. The Methodist conference that met at Mansfield in 1854 reported 5,085 white and 5,459 black members – a gain of 1,000 over the previous year.15 Data shows that in William J. Seymour’s St. Mary’s Parish, the Methodist were present in the 1800’s.21
Not to be outdone were the Louisiana Baptist which were evangelizing whites and Negroes all over the
Black religion was no longer regarded as exemplary or special. During a time of growing segregation and violence, some black leaders attempted to counter this perspective seen by whites by embracing the romantic racialist notions that “blacks possessed peculiar gifts.” These gifts being directly connected to the importance of black churches in a time of direct exclusion of blacks from other pieces of society.
What ministry types are present within the Black Urban Church that may not take place in the Black Rural Church setting? (Chapter 6) The present picture of black urban churches is a complicated, mixed picture of some effects of privatization among unchurched sectors of the black population, and the withdrawal of some black churches into a sphere of personal piety and religiosity; but there are also numerous signs of a continuing tradition of activism and involvement in the political, economic, educational, and cultural aspects of black life among the majority of black clergy and churches (Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya
And upon this ground our ….. and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.” Furthermore, many African Americans were very religious. After the civil war and even during it, many African Americans started their own churches separate to the churches that the whites went to. Reverend Mr. Gloucester, an African American, was a minister at a Presbyterian Church who had “friends of religion and of the poor Africans in Philadelphia subscribed liberally towards building him a church” (Document
- Nystrom, Justin A. "Reconstruction." In knowlouisiana.org Encyclopedia of Louisiana, David Johnson. Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010-2018. October 30, 2015. http://www.knowlouisiana.org/entry/reconstruction
The African Meeting House was used for many purposes during the 1800's that was essential to blacks in Boston and helped the mission of antislavery reformers. The meeting house first served as a church founded by Thomas Paul, an African American preacher, in 1805. The church was named the First African Baptist Church. Although, black Bostonians were able to attend white churches, they faced discrimination and were put in assigned seats in the balconies. The creation of the church gave blacks the opportunity to worship freely away from anti black sentiment. The meeting house was constructed entirely on black labor, but funds were raised in white and black communities. The church was meant to be only attended by the black population , but a
It also became one of the centers of black conversion. Philadelphia was one of the biggest free black communities of the colonies and it became an early center where African Americans could practice religious freedom. While on the tour we walked past Philadelphia’s first African American church, Mother Bethel Church, established in the late eighteenth century. This church was founded by a slave named Richard Allen and has a long history of civil rights issues. It was one of the first churches to let African Americans practice their faith
Peter Randolph, too, presented the durable linkage between African-Americans, especially during slavery. Their alliance was characterized by creating the so called, “plantation churches” whenever they could not attend the actual church services. By doing so, they could simply gather together, remember their traditions, dance, sing, recite their prayers, sorrows or play banjo. All those familiar activities were helping them hold on to their culture, refine their identity and avoid the “Social Death” or “Cultural Genocide” they were subjected to. Similarly, creating the AME Church, along with following churches, such as the Ethiopian Church of Jesus Christ, was a method of showing to the society that the African history and beliefs are not forgotten.
As a result of the white clergymen who did not preach the whole gospel? Slaves develop what became known as the invisible church which drew from the African traditions and revivalist forms of worship. “It ain’t enough to talk about God, you’ve got to feel him moving on the altar of your heart,” (45). Therefore, the slaves along with slave preachers instituted the invisible church. The slaves used hymns as coded language to announce prayer meeting. Also hymns were used to talk about plans of escape to the North. Similarly, the invisible church helped to organize the revolts of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. Raboteau points out that the invisible church had a dual function in the religious life of the slaves. The invisible church was otherworldly in the sense that this world was not the end nor the final measure of a person’s existence. Likewise, the invisible church was this- worldly because it helped the slaves to experience their own personal value (59). Chapter four examined looking for emancipation and the limits of freedom. The invisible church became visible and education became one of the primary emphasis of the freedman and the church. During the reconstruction period of 1865- 1877, white churches organized some of the historically black colleges. A number of school and colleges were founded by black churches also. What looked like the promise land for the freed slaves soon turned
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) founded in 1845 at Augusta, Georgia, is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The name itself tells us the geographical location of where the most number of these churches were founded. Although primarily found in the southern region of the United States, in recent years they have expanded to all regions of the country. “Due to its expansion their annual convention has been held in cities outside of the southern area, therefore giving the name “Southern” a large misconception” (Mead, Hill, & Atwood, 2001, p. 64)
In 1845, a group of men met in Augusta, Georgia to organize the Southern Baptist Convention, “to promote Foreign and Domestic Missions and other important objects connected with the Redeemer’s Kingdom,” among Baptist churches in the South. Part of the strategy to promote domestic missions was to create the Domestic Mission Board which would be located in Marion, AL with the initial delegated tasks of developing and executing religious education for blacks in the South and “to aid the present effort, to establish the Baptist cause in the city of New Orleans.”
Richard Allen started the African Methodist-Episcopal church in a response to the treatment of black congregants in white churches (Gates, 2014). For instance, Richard Allen was invited to preach at a white church, but he noticed that the Black congregants were unable to sit in the same pews with the White congregants (Gates, 2014). As a result of this Allen with some friends staged Americas first sit in by going into a White church and sitting in the “white” congregants pews to pray (Gates, 2014). The white preachers approached Allen and his friends and told them that they could not sit and that area and that they needed to leave the church (Gates, 2014). On account of this Allen started the African American Episcopal Church in Philadelphia,
The plantation owners in the Southern states attempted to Christianize the blacks. They would not let the slaves practice their own religions. That doesn’t mean the slaves didn’t secretly practice their native religion at night. Some slaves were originally Christian. Others were Roman Catholic, Islamic, and some even practiced Voodoo or
The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, dates back to October of 1796, when it was organized
By revealing the opposition and obstacles, the black church may seize the opportunity of becoming a force to be reckoned with in our society. America was born with a grotesque, cancerous disease called slavery. This disease lingers to this day in many forms and subtle variations. The plantation mentality is still with us. Sometimes it masquerades as democracy and free enterprise, but the effect is the same on the spirits of the poor and oppressed. When black men moved indoors to work in industry and business, they found themselves imprisoned behind the walls of institutional racism. Nothing really had
Within the African-American community, Christianity has manifest itself to be one of the cornerstones of the community. Surprisingly enough however, the church was introduced to African-Americans as a means of trying to control the thoughts and actions of the slaves. When analyzing the church in its modern state, it would be hard to come to this realization. Since its humble beginnings, many African-Americans have come to adopt the Christian faith as their own. Even as slaves, African-Americans began starting their own churches to allow them to worship how they wanted. Churches such as Greater Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church (GMPMBC) (which has been a part of the local community since 1939) are prime examples of how the church has grown to become an integral part of the African-American community. This paper will analyze the history of GMPMBC and discuss how it is overlooked in mainstream society. From there, it will transition in to discussing how the church has been neglected by the community it serves.