A brief history of black churches in America

SALISBURY — Benjamin Watts, pastor of the Shiloh Baptist Church in New London, told a Salisbury audience that the historically black churches in the United States developed “out of an abundance of life-shaping trials.”

Watts spoke at the Scoville Memorial Library on Sunday, Nov. 6, as part of the Peace Through Understanding series sponsored by the Salisbury Congregational Church.

Watts, who is a professor of homiletics at Hartford Seminary, said there is no monolithic “black church.”

Most church-going African Americans belong to seven historically black denominations: the National Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and the Church of God in Christ.

Watts said that “different ways, different styles” have “broken up many a congregation” over the years.

But what the various groups have in common is history.

After 250 years of slavery and another 100 years of segregation, “the black cosmos is going to be a little different.”

Watts said the black church was “one of the few stable and coherent institutions to emerge from slavery.”

In the mid-18th century, slave owners wanted to do their Christian duty by their slaves, Watts said, but they did not want the slaves to start thinking of the church as a means of liberation.

“For a long time there were no black pastors.”

In the post-Civil War period, black churches emerged, and the former slaves were empowered to vote.

For a while, anyway.

As Jim Crow laws were enacted, and the nation was divided once again, black churches received an unmistakable message: They were tolerated “as long as you know your place.”

During Reconstruction, blacks joined the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.

And they stayed there until the civil rights period of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Watts said the reason African Americans switched from the Republican party to the Democrats was simple: President John F. Kennedy took their side against the segregationists.

“The three pictures on the wall in black homes? JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus.”

Watts elaborated that, “JFK made the call. Lyndon Baines Johnson gets it done, but it’s JFK on the wall.”

Asked about the current political scene, Watts gave some credit to GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump for “saying some of the right things,” but added that Trump’s understanding of African American communities is superficial.

As for the Democrats, Watts said “they have over-promised and under-delivered.”

After the talk, the audience moved across the street to the Congregational Church for a concert featuring Huntley Brown and the Salisbury Area Gospel Choir (led by Michael Whitney Brown).