Black religious leadership directly fueled slave rebellions in early nineteenth-century America

Evidence

The gospel clearly contained inspiration for the freedom struggle, and not always through peaceful means. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, enslaved people, often motivated by religious fervor, regularly joined uprisings led by Black spiritual leaders. Denmark Vesey, a free carpenter and a member of Charleston’s A.M.E. church, made plans for a rebellion in the city in 1822. After his capture and execution, local white residents burned the church—the same congregation Dylann Roof attacked in 2015—to the ground. Nat Turner, a preacher who believed he had received prophetic visions of Jesus’s apocalyptic return, led a rebellion in 1831 that killed fifty-five white people. After he was captured and executed, along with some two hundred freed and enslaved Black persons, Virginia enacted laws forbidding Black people from attending religious gatherings without white observers present. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1032

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that Dylann Roof attacked the same A.M.E. congregation the white mob burned in 1822 is a striking throughline perfect for someone into American racial memory.
• ADDENDUM: Compliments the immodesty/moral-panic article: how white Christian establishment responded to Black religious autonomy with violence and new prohibitory law.
• XREF: connects to: The National Baptist Convention asserted autonomous control of black racial life — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 327