![]() ![]() His is a charismatic cast, from the titans - Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr. With a surgeon's skill, Gates teases out the threads of the various Black denominations - Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal and Church of Christ, among them - and their dogmatic skirmishes. ![]() "Musicians and singers used repetition as a basis for improvisation, like a jazz soloist breaking away from the beat." "The vocals, the melodies, the repetitions, the ring shout - all were as distinct from white American music and worship as Black people were from white people," Gates observes. ![]() The mother continent beget its own rituals of songs and dance. " was the proving ground for the nourishment and training of a class of leaders it fostered community bonds and established the first local, regional, and then national Black social networks." ![]() Slaves first gathered covertly in praise houses, away from the ambivalent gaze of their white owners, who sought to control them with parables of a meek, submissive Jesus while shunning the liberation narrative of Exodus.Īfter Appomattox, "The Black Church, in a society in which the color line was strictly policed, amounted to a world within the world," Gates writes. Tens of thousands of Africans who survived the Middle Passage were Muslim Gates delves into the subtle ways Islam shaped early African American Christianity. To contemplate religion in America is to contemplate the Black/white divide. ![]()
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