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By Root 1201 0

to the white minister. “The Ebony preacher who promises perfect independence from White control and direction carries the col[ore]d heart at once,” an officer in the American Missionary Association observed. Near Columbia, Kentucky, a newly freed slave who had some years before been ordained as a deacon and elder in the white Methodist Episcopal Church needed little persuasion to transfer his loyalties to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “I was offered liberal inducements to continue in the M.E. Church and preach to my people,” he explained, “but I preferred to come out from under the yoke. I had been there long enough.” That was reason enough for tens of thousands of freedmen and freedwomen to abandon the white-dominated churches for their own facilities, organizations, and preachers; indeed, such a move became for some as important and symbolic an assertion of freedom as the decision to separate from the scene of their bondage. For years they had listened to the white preachers admonish them to embrace their situation and obey their worldly masters in order to gain admission to “the kitchen of heaven.”

When the white preacher come he preach and pick up his Bible and claim he gittin the text right out from the good Book and he preach: “The Lord say, don’t you niggers steal chickens from your missus. Don’t you steal your marster’s hawgs.” That would be all he preach.

For years, too, they had put up with the deception and hypocrisy of these professed men of God, some of whom were themselves slaveholders. “The man that baptized me,” Susan Boggs observed, “had a colored woman tied up in his yard to whip when he got home, that very Sunday and her mother belonged to that same church.… That was our preacher!” Nor did the stale and empty sermons of the white minister and his manner of worship succeed in moving them spiritually or emotionally. “Dat ole white preachin’ wasn’t nothin’,” Nancy Williams recalled. “Ole white preachers used to talk wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’, but Jesus told us slaves to talk wid our hearts.” Inevitably, then, as a former Texas slave suggested, “the whites preached to the niggers and the niggers preached to themselves.”27

With many slaves preferring one of their own to preach God’s word, the arrangement worked out in some churches before the Civil War permitted the black worshippers to convene separately with their own preacher or exhorter, though a white man would presumably be present to oversee the proceedings. Typically, a former Alabama slave recalled, “white fo’ks have deir service in de mornin’ an’ ‘Niggers’ have deirs in de evenin’, a’ter dey clean up, wash de dishes, an’ look a’ter everything.… Ya’see ‘Niggers’ lack’ta shout a whole lot an’ wid de white fo’ks al’round’em, dey couldn’t shout jes’ lack dey want to.” Where such liberties were not permitted the slaves, the master might hire a white preacher to visit the plantation, or the slaves would simply accompany the master’s family to the white church and sit in the gallery overlooking the white worshippers. Later in the day or that night, without the master’s knowledge, the slaves would gather in their quarters or in the nearby woods to hold the “real meetin’.” Emancipation, however, enabled blacks to dispense with the secrecy and the pretense. The black preacher and exhorter no longer needed to accommodate sermons to the needs and presence of the master, nor did black worshippers need to fear an imminent intrusion by white men into their services. “Praise God for this day of liberty to worship God!” was how one freedman described his new status, while another placed his hand on the shoulder of the black preacher and remarked, “Bless God, my son, we don’t have to keep watch at that door to tell us the patrollers are coming to take us to jail and fine us twenty-five dollars for prayin’ and talkin’ of the love of Jesus. O no, we’s FREE!”28

Where blacks had once been obliged to worship under a white preacher, they were now in a position to depose him, hire their own preacher, and choose their own organizational affiliation.