Contributing to religious pluralism, more and more slaves converted to Christianity over time, creating “what might be termed ‘the invisible institution’–black religion under slavery” (Raboteau, 1978, p. ix). Forged in “hush harbors,” slave Christianity spawned separate churches, mainly Baptist and Methodist, ca. 1760s. “The Negro Church is the only social institution of the Negroes which started in the African forest and survived slavery,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, “under the leadership of priest or medicine man, afterward the Christian pastor, the Church preserved in itself the remnants of African tribal life and became after emancipation the center of Negro social life.” He added “that today the Negro population of the United States is virtually divided into church congregations which are the real units of race life” (Du Bois, 2011, p. ii).

Congregations created major denominations. The African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816), African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1821), Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (1870), National Baptist Convention (1895), Church of God in Christ (1897), National Baptist Convention of America (1915), and Progressive National Baptist Convention (1961) aggregated 80 percent of black Christian memberships by the 1990s; 20 percent of black Christians were in historically white denominations.

Black churches led struggles for justice. From colonial times, they espoused freedom, literacy, and morality. The first interstate black institutions, beside Negro Masons, mutual aid, and temperance societies, churches resisted the colonizing of freed blacks in Africa; sponsored Canadian, Caribbean, and African missions; and sustained the Convention Movement (1830–93), the “most representative vehicle” of black uplift. State and national conventions advocated abolitionism, self-help, Union loyalty, emancipation, and citizenship. Churchmen and women were notable among post–Civil War delegates, who pursued federal and state enforcement of African American schooling; wage labor; and rights, notably suffrage and office holding; and security of black life, limb, and property. Denominational bodies enlarged regionally, nationally, and internationally post-Reconstruction, as churchmen and women fostered black progress. The ex-slave Union soldier William W. Browne preached economic unity at his Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. In 1881 he founded the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers, whose thrift and financial solidarity resulted in a three-story building, regalia factory, insurance company, and, by 1888, the first black-owned bank.