DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Slave Life and Institutions
African-American slaves developed vibrant religious and other social institutions
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
African-American slaves were compelled to work hard, and in some cases brutally hard. In some states, laws known as slave codes authorized terrible punishments for offending slaves. According to Virginia’s 1705 slave code:
All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion … shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction … the master shall be free of all punishment … as if such accident never happened.
This code also required that slaves obtain written permission before leaving their plantation. It authorized whipping, branding, and maiming as punishment for even minor offenses. Some codes forbade teaching slaves how to read and write. In Georgia, the punishment for this offense was a fine and/or whipping if the guilty party were a “slave, Negro, or free person of color.”
Although the lot of American slaves was harsh, they labored under material conditions by some measures comparable to those endured by many European workers and peasants of that era. But there was a difference. The slaves lacked their freedom.
Denial of fundamental human rights handicapped African-American political and economic progress, but slaves responded by creating institutions of their own, vibrant institutions on which the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century would later draw for sustenance and social capital. Earlier accounts often portrayed the slaves as infantilized objects “acted upon” by their white masters, but we now understand that many slave communities managed to carve out a measure of personal, cultural, and religious autonomy. “It was not that the slaves did not act like men,” historian Eugene Genovese writes. “Rather, it was that they could not grasp their collective strength as a people and act like political men.” Nevertheless, Genovese concludes that most slaves “found ways to develop and assert their manhood and womanhood despite the dangerous compromises forced upon them.”
One way was the “black church.” Over time, increasing numbers of African-American slaves embraced Christianity, typically denominations like Baptist and Methodist that prevailed among white southerners. Some masters feared that Christian tenets would undermine their justifications for slavery, but others encouraged their slaves to attend church, although in a separate, “blacks-only” section.
After exposure to Christianity, many slaves then established their own parallel, or underground, churches. These churches often blended Christianity with aspects of the slaves’ former African religious cultures and beliefs. Religious services commonly incorporated shouting, dance, and the call-and-response interactions that would later feature prominently in the great sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leading black preachers. The black church often emphasized different aspects of the Christian tradition than did southern white churches. Where the latter might interpret the biblical Curse of Ham (“a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren”) as justifying slavery, African-American services might instead emphasize the story of how Moses led the Israelites from bondage.
For African-American slaves, religion offered a measure of solace and hope. After the American Civil War brought an end to slavery, black churches and denominational organizations grew in membership, influence, and organizational strength, factors that would prove vital to the success of the civil rights movement.
