Black institutions arose because white supremacy excluded blacks from civic life

Evidence

This brings me to the second sense of black America: those institutions that have traditionally served as the foundation of black communities in the United States. Because of white supremacy in this country, black Americans have had to build institutions that both cultivated their civic capacities and served as a space to transmit values that opposed the value gap. Institutions like black churches emerged in the nineteenth century because of the exclusion of black Christians in predominantly white denominations (they had to sit in what were called “nigger pews,” had to receive Communion last, and were not allowed to bury their dead in church cemeteries), but also because of a desire to build independent black communities. … Black churches, social clubs, schools and colleges, newspapers, masonic orders, and fraternal and sororal organizations—this broad associational life of Black America—served as the life force of communities under continuous racial assault. They provided services in lieu of the government’s failure to extend the full benefits of citizenship to black people. … These institutions, along with informal spaces of leisure and play—the places where we danced, played cards, told jokes, and enjoyed the beauty of living a life together—not only helped black Americans to survive this racist country. They also gave us the courage to fight back. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 342

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on how marginalized communities build parallel institutions (e.g., the law merchant literature’s parallel/private ordering theme, and This excluded the infrastructure ideas in the Frankfurt School’s counter-institutions). — connects to: Black scientists achieved breakthroughs whenever exclusionary structures permitted them access — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1578; Legal exclusion forced the black church to become the community’s de facto public space — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 62; For excluded African Americans, the church became the chief arena of black public life — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 71 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Walks through Glaude’s second sense of ‘black America’ as institutional infrastructure, key to his distinction between a people and its institutions.