The Bombed Church: The Black Church in America

The first Black congregations in America were formed in the 1770s — not as a choice for separatism, but as a response to exclusion. Black members of white Methodist and Baptist churches were seated in separate sections, denied communion at the same table, barred from leadership, and excluded from the full practices of the faith they shared. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones walked out of St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia in 1787 after being pulled from their knees during prayer because they had sat in a section reserved for white members. Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 — the first major Black denomination in American history.

For enslaved people in the South, the church was even more fundamental. The "invisible institution" — secret religious gatherings held in the woods, in swamps, in quarters at night — was the primary space of cultural preservation, community, and resistance that slavery could not fully suppress. Religion was permitted by enslavers when it preached obedience; the secret church preached something else. It preserved African cultural practices in the form of the ring shout, the coded spiritual ("Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was a signal about the Underground Railroad), and a theology of liberation drawn from Exodus rather than from Paul's letters about slaves obeying masters.

After the uprisings and the literacy laws — particularly after Denmark Vesey was found to have organized his planned 1822 Charleston uprising through the AME Church — all-Black churches were banned in South Carolina. The ban confirmed what the enslaving class feared: the church was where Black people organized.

After emancipation, the Black church became the institutional anchor of Black community life in a way that had no equivalent in white communities. It performed functions that, for white Americans, were distributed across schools, banks, mutual aid societies, political parties, newspapers, and social clubs — because Black people were excluded from all of those. The church held them all.

On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963 — three weeks after the March on Washington — members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a box of dynamite under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The church had served as a staging ground for the Children's Crusade and was the center of Birmingham's civil rights organizing. At 10:22 a.m., during Sunday school, the bomb exploded.

It killed four girls: Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11). Twenty-two others were injured. A fifth girl, Sarah Collins — Addie Mae's sister — lost an eye. The killers were identified by local law enforcement and the FBI almost immediately. No one was charged for 14 years. Robert Chambliss was finally convicted in 1977. The other three conspirators were not convicted until 2001 and 2002 — 38 years after the crime.

The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was not unusual. It was one of over 40 Black churches bombed in Alabama alone during the Civil Rights era. Birmingham was nicknamed "Bombingham" — there had been so many unsolved bombings of Black homes and churches in the city that the FBI had a standing investigation going back to the 1940s. The bombings were not random acts of individual hatred. They were a systematic campaign to destroy the infrastructure that made Black organizing possible.

Between January 1995 and June 1996, more than 100 Black churches were burned across the South and border states. The burnings were concentrated in states where Black voter registration had recently increased. Federal investigators identified at least some of the fires as coordinated. Congress passed the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, making it a federal crime to destroy a house of worship because of its racial or religious character — the first new civil rights legislation in years.

The National Council of Churches raised $9 million to rebuild burned churches. Many communities rebuilt in months, gathering materials and labor from across the country. The resilience of the Black church as a community institution was demonstrated not just in its survival of repeated attacks but in the speed and completeness with which communities restored what had been destroyed — and resumed the organizing work the attacks were intended to stop.

On June 17, 2015, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof attended a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He sat with the congregation for an hour before opening fire. He killed nine people: Reverend Clementa Pinckney (also a state senator), Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson.

Emanuel AME — known as "Mother Emanuel" — was one of the oldest Black congregations in the South, founded in 1816 by the same Denmark Vesey who organized the 1822 planned slave uprising. The church had been burned to the ground by white authorities in 1822 after Vesey's plot was discovered, and again in 1861. It had survived. Its congregation had continued. In 2015 it was 199 years old.

Roof was captured the following day. He was tried and convicted of federal hate crimes and murder. In his manifesto, he wrote that he had hoped the attack would start a race war. Instead, the families of victims offered public forgiveness at his bond hearing — an act of grace that stunned the country and that Roof said he had not anticipated. The Confederate flag flying on the South Carolina State House grounds was removed within weeks of the massacre, after years of failed campaigns to do so.

The Black church produced the musical tradition that underlies virtually all American popular music. Gospel music — with its call and response, its improvisation, its emotional directness, its rhythm — was the laboratory where American musical forms were developed. Thomas Dorsey, who wrote "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" in 1932 after the death of his wife and newborn son, established the formal genre of gospel music. Mahalia Jackson carried it to international audiences. The young people who grew up in church — Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye — took the gospel vocabulary into secular music and created soul, R&B, and every popular form that followed.

Aretha Franklin grew up singing in her father's Detroit church, New Bethel Baptist. Her voice was trained by the gospel tradition. Her 1967 album I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You — which made her a star — was the sound of the church applied to secular experience. When she sang "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," it had the force of a sermon. The Black church gave American music its emotional power, its rhythmic complexity, and its vocal tradition. American popular music spent the 20th century appropriating that tradition, often without acknowledging its source.

White slaveholders encouraged their enslaved people to attend church and hear sermons about obedience — "Slaves, obey your masters" (Ephesians 6:5). The Black church, in its secret gatherings and in its own denominations, read a different Bible. The central text was Exodus: God hearing the cry of an enslaved people, God demanding "Let my people go," God parting the sea. The God of the Black church was not a God of acceptance of suffering but a God who acts in history on behalf of the oppressed.

James Cone, who developed Black Liberation Theology formally in 1969, articulated what the Black church had been practicing for centuries: that Christian theology cannot be separated from the lived experience of oppression, and that God's preferential concern for the poor and marginalized is the center of the gospel, not a footnote. Cone's work was controversial in white theological circles. It described what every Black churchgoer knew: that the same faith had been used to justify their enslavement and to sustain their resistance, and that these could not be the same religion.

The Black church in America is 250 years old and has been bombed, burned, banned, surveilled, and infiltrated through every one of those years. It continues to function as the organizing infrastructure it has always been. Voter registration drives run through Black churches. Food banks operate from church kitchens. After-school programs meet in fellowship halls. The NAACP was founded at a church meeting. The Civil Rights Movement was coordinated from church pulpits. Black Lives Matter chapters meet in churches. The tradition continues.

The attacks continue too. The three Louisiana church burnings in 2019, the ongoing pattern of white supremacist threats against Black congregations, the political targeting of Black churches by voter suppression advocates who oppose "Souls to the Polls" Sunday voting drives — the same logic that burned the first reconstructed church in 1865 is still present in 2024, because the church is still doing what it has always done: providing the infrastructure of Black life that the broader society refuses to provide and has historically tried to destroy.

The measure of what the Black church represents is in the fact that when Dylann Roof killed nine people at Mother Emanuel, the congregation did not close. Within days, it resumed services. Within weeks, it was again hosting community meetings. The building can be burned. The institution — 250 years old, built by people who had nothing, sustained through everything — has not been.