This is the fourth in a series. Here are the first, second, and third articles.
About 300 ago, enslavers captured a group of Black Catholics from Central Africa and the Kingdom of Kongo and brought them to low-country South Carolina.
The group’s captivity was a violation of previously established tradition within Western Christianity that Christians should not enslave other Christians. Based on that tradition, the Africans should not have been taken or at least should have been freed when their faith was discovered. But none of that happened. As the slave trade grew, colonial governments implemented laws that severed the relationship between Christianity and freedom. The Catholics remained in the US, and some of the earliest historical records we have about Black Christians in America trace back to them.
The story of the Kongolese and other African Christians adds to the history of the nation’s diverse tapestry of Black Christianity. It also underscores a part that is often overlooked: The story of Black Christianity in America is not merely about people who shed their local religions and become Christians in the US. It is also about those who brought their faith with them to America, whether through enslavement or immigration. The latter will mostly be my focus here.
Historians say the presence of the African Catholics in South Carolina played a significant part in the first mass conversion of slaves, which took place during the Great Awakening. At the time, Black Christians were participating in evangelical revivals sweeping through England, its island territories, and the American colonies. As white preachers and missionaries were connecting believers across borders, the first Black evangelicals were also doing the same.
Take George Liele, the founder of one of the first Black Baptist churches. He left America after he secured his freedom from slavery and planted the first Baptist church in Jamaica. He named it the Ethiopian Baptist Church, referencing the East African nation as a signifier for all things Black.
During his missionary work, Liele helped convert people who became influential preachers and contributed to historically Black churches across Jamaica, the American South, Canada, and West Africa. Around that time, other African Americans—including Zilpha Elaw, Alexander Crummell, and Joseph Harden—were also ministering to the broader African diaspora by spreading the gospel, planting churches and schools, and launching a wave of Black missionaries around the world.
As African Americans ministered overseas, Black immigrants were also arriving on America’s shores. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people from the West Indies came to America and became integrated within the Black church. Among them was Denmark Vesey, who helped establish Charleston’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church (famously known as Mother Emanuel), and led a revolt against slavery.
Others cropped up as time went on. In the early 20th century, B. M. Nottage, a Black immigrant from the Bahamas, became one of the most prominent evangelists and church planters in America and worked with his two brothers to minister to Black communities across the country.
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Although Black immigration did occur during this time, it was fairly small. Immigrants from Africa—as well as Asia—were essentially barred from entering the US, while those from southern and eastern Europe were restricted under discriminatory policies that favored migration from western and northern Europe.
Still, the relatively small number of Black immigrations who did manage to come cultivated their own churches. The family story of Vincent Harding, a Barbadian American who drafted some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches and became a known voice in the Civil Rights Movement, was emblematic of the growing sub-group. Harding’s mother immigrated from Barbados to the US shortly after the First World War. The family was Seventh-day Adventists, which was led by white leaders. But eventually, Harding’s family joined with other Black immigrants who formed their own branch, called the Seventh-Day Christian Church.
In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement helped create the political atmosphere for changes in immigration law. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation that removed the ethnicity-based quota policy and opened the door for immigrants across the board.
Today, more than 5 million Black immigrants live in America. That essentially means about one in ten Black people in the US were born abroad, and about a quarter of Black Americans are immigrants or the child of at least one migrant.
African immigrants are the fastest-growing Black immigrant group in the country. They are also the most religiously inclined population in America, and the Christian communities they form tend to be theologically conservative, Bible-centered, and missional.
But like most African American Christians, they don’t typically self-identify as evangelical. Instead, they often use denominational language, like Pentecostal—a pattern also found among Caribbean immigrants, who tend to add adjectives in front of traditional evangelical denominations, such as Haitian Baptist Church.
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As immigrants and their children integrate, they become more likely to join and lead congregations that swim within the culture of American evangelicalism, such as Atlanta’s prominent 2819 Church, a multiethnic congregation pastored by Philip Anthony Mitchell, a first-generation Trinidadian American.
But many are also found within traditional Black church denominations, and their presence is expected to grow in the coming decades. By 2060, there will be an estimated 9.5 million Black immigrants in America, which means denominations like the Church of God in Christ and AME Zion will experience more ethnic diversity not only overseas (where many Black denominations already have churches), but also in the homeland.
My own family is part of that future. My husband is Haitian American, I’m African American and in New York, which we have long considered home, it’s common to see couples who are part of the same racial group but have different ethnic and cultural roots.
The churches my husband and I have attended reflect our family’s blended roots, whether a Haitian Baptist congregation with Creole liturgy or a Methodist church I helped pastor in the Bronx with African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Black European congregants.
Both of us have also experienced the beauty of churches that identify as evangelical and have members across various racial groups. Nevertheless, as a Black couple in America, a good life for us now includes the comfort and security of being members of an ethnically diverse Black church.
Beyond our faith, what has glued our church together is the shared experience of being Black in America. The Black church that nurtures our faith is also what reaffirms our understanding of God’s love for the stranger, pursues societal justice, pushes back against an America-centered view of the gospel, and reminds us that the image of God also comes in Black.
In a country that has a history of being hostile to Black people, this is no small gift. We needed a church that faithfully applies the gospel to the challenges we face as a household, and for us, the Black church is still the strongest in doing so.
But the part of the Black church that I often see, the kind populated by immigrants with evangelical convictions, remains relatively unknown among many Americans. Nonetheless, as immigrants and their children continue to multiply, it will be more visible and shake up the popular notion of what it means to be an evangelical in America.
Jessica Janvier is an academic whose focus crosses the intersections of African American religious history and church history. She teaches at Meachum School of Haymanot and works in the Intercultural Studies Department at Columbia International University.
