Independent slave-led worship alarmed authorities and drove out the Jesuits

Evidence

To sell what they produced in their garden plots, slaves had to be given permission to go to the towns on Sundays. Such journeys also provided valuable opportunities for worship and socializing. Many slaves shed the threadbare clothes they wore in the field—which were given them by the master—for a clean, fancier set they had bought for themselves. In Le Cap there was a special “messe des nègres” after the regular mass, during which slaves and free people of African descent gathered to pray and sing, led by elderly members of their community. The fact that slaves were leading Catholic ceremonies bothered some authorities, and indeed the accusation that Jesuits had encouraged such independent worship helped propel the expulsion of the order from Saint-Domingue in the 1760s. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 178

Categorization

• XREF: These Sunday gatherings, combining market, worship, and socializing, are the proto-assembly spaces from which revolutionary organization later emerged.