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wnen you stop to think about it, you might wonder why these folks celebrate anything. Their history, after all, is not a bed of roses; some of it is grim indeed. But maybe, just maybe, they are on to something: rather than lament the past, they choose to celebrate life, unfettered by all the material and emotional baggage that most of us carry around.
This has not been an easy choice. The Blacks forcibly transported from Africa in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds could hardly have brought with them a Christian view of their plight. One can thus understand that early attempts to evangelize slaves were less than successful, given their resentment, fear, anger, and despair; hard to contemplate ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know’ under those conditions. Gradually, their willingness to embrace Christianity increased a bit, if perhaps only to relieve a little of the anguish of their condition. A wave of evangelical revivals in the mid 1700s attracted a number of Blacks. Although there were clearly spiritual benefits, perhaps more important was the fact that religion was the sole area in which a semblance of ‘free’ public discourse was permitted them.
In fact, by the time of the America Revolution, the Methodists and Baptists were even licensing both slaves and freemen as ministers. By the late 1770s, Black churches had been established in both the North and South. ' Indeed church was considered the only ‘safe’ public activity which Blacks might pursue. But like all else in the society of the times anxious and /or domineering Whites dictated the direction taken by these churches in the two sections.
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