#History of ushers in the black church full

(Other churches would be the subject of deadly attacks and explosions carried out at the hands of white supremacists, most notably the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, in which four little girls were killed, another was blinded, and more than a dozen people were injured.)

Richard Harvey Cain left his congregation in New York to go south, to resurrect Mother Emanuel, and then, during Reconstruction, was elected to the U.S. Following Denmark Vesey’s alleged slave insurrection, Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., was burned to the ground at the end of the Civil War, the Rev. Early on, the church and Christianity played a role both in Black rebellions and in the preparation of Black people for leadership roles. The “failure” of African Americans to overthrow their masters, as the enslaved men and women did on the island that became the Republic of Haiti, can’t be traced to the role of the church per se, as Nat Turner’s decision to act based on his interpretation of prophecy attests. Most normal human beings don’t need an elaborate religious belief system to resist the temptation to sacrifice their lives in the face of overwhelming odds and the certainty that they will be brutally suppressed and killed. It isn’t religion that keeps human beings enslaved it is violence. Despite what Marx and the Black Panthers thought, the importance of the role of the Black Church at its best cannot be gainsaid in the history of the African American people. People, of course, pray and worship for all sorts of reasons. Person and Noah and Brooke Porter “History of American Conspiracies,” 1863 “Nat Turner and His Confederates in Conference,” an engraving by John Rogers based on an illustration by Felix Darley.

#History of ushers in the black church full

What most intrigues me about Marx’s full quote is his realization that it is at once “the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” a crucial part of the quote that seems to have fallen away.Ī Bible belonging to Nat Turner from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Du Bois’s triptych of “the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy” to the use of the building itself - to see the revolutionary potential and practice of Black Christianity in forging social change. But we need only look at the brilliant use of the church in all of its forms - from W. The role of Black Christianity in motivating our country’s largest slave rebellion, Nat Turner’s rebellion, Southampton County, Va., is only the most dramatic example of the text of the King James Bible being called upon to justify the violent revolutionary overthrow of the slave regime. That note in music heard not with the ears? These songs of sorrow, love and faith, and hope? What merely living clod, what captive thing,Ĭould up toward God through all its darkness grope,Īnd find within its deadened heart to sing James Weldon Johnson, in his lovely poem about the anonymous authors of the sacred vernacular tradition, “O Black and Unknown Bards,” put this failure of interpretive reciprocity in this memorable way: It is the opium of the people.” Marx could not imagine the complexity of the Black Church, even if the Black Church could imagine him - could imagine those who lacked the tools to see beyond its surface levels of meaning. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. The full quote bears repeating: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. But I do not believe that religion functioned in this simple fashion in the history of Black people in this country.Īs a matter of fact, although Marx was no fan of religion, to put it mildly, this statement, which the Panthers loved to quote, was part of a more complicated assessment of the nature and function of religion. There were those who argued that the Black Church was an example of Karl Marx’s famous indictment of religion as “the opium of the people” because it gave to the oppressed false comfort and hope, obscuring the causes of their oppression and reducing their urge to overturn that oppression. Political activists - including Malcolm X, of course, but especially the Black Panther Party in the latter half of the 1960s - have debated whether the role of the Black embrace of Christianity under slavery was a positive or negative force. Excerpted from “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” by Henry Louis Gates Jr.