Black History Month invites us to not only acknowledge suffering and injustice, but to recognize and affirm that Black History is so much more than a story of suffering. Black History Month also invites us to celebrate survival, creativity, and God’s abiding faithfulness. It calls us to tell the truth about history and to honor the roots that still nourish us.
In Resurrection Song: African American Spirituality, Flora Wilson Bridges reminds us that the story of the Black Church did not begin in the holds of slave ships. It began long before, in Africa. Bridges argues that African traditional culture, spirituality, and religious practices profoundly shaped Black religion and spirituality in North America. Enslaved Africans were not blank slates upon arrival. They carried culture, rituals, and theological imaginations with them. They carried memory. They carried knowledge of God. And when the European church attempted to rationalize exploitation and preach a distorted, racist version of Christianity, many Africans and their descendants refused to conform.
They were not converted to the anti-Christ of white supremacy. Instead, they continued to look to Africa, to African values, communal ethics, reverence for the Spirit, and holistic understandings of life, in order to define themselves for themselves. That refusal was not merely theological resistance. It was a fight for belonging.
Slaveholding culture sought to erase identity, fracture community, and strip dignity. But enslaved Africans drew from ancestral traditions to preserve a sense of the self that could not be owned. They formed invisible institutions, brush arbor gatherings, ring shouts, and prayer meetings where their humanity was recognized, affirmed, and remembered. In these sacred spaces, belonging was not granted by the oppressor. It was declared by God and confirmed within their community.
By defining themselves for themselves, they built a spiritual home that did not depend on white recognition. They forged a communal belonging where Black life was cherished, where sorrow could moan and joy could shout, where suffering did not have the final word. This rootedness in African spirituality did more than sustain them. It reframed the very nature of African American Christianity. The faith of enslaved Africans was not a borrowed religion imposed upon a passive people. It was an inheritance from their African ancestors.
In Black Church Beginnings, Henry Mitchell contends that it is healing to the African American psyche and spirit to recognize that many core beliefs of African American Christianity were already present among our forebears in Africa. They were not taught faith “from scratch” by oppressors. They brought with them a deep sense of the sacred, a belief in divine justice, a reverence for Spirit, and a communal understanding of salvation.
To say this during Black History Month is to tell the truth: the Black Church is not an offshoot of white Christianity. It is a continuation of ancestral wisdom meeting the liberating Christ. It is a community shaped from within, not defined by the voices or actions of those who sought to dominate it.
The ring shout, the hum, the call-and-response, the insistence that God sides with the oppressed, these are not simply add-ons. They are a profound theological testimony. They testify that even in chains, the Spirit was moving. Even under terror, faith was rising. Even in exile and diaspora, Africa was not erased. It was remembered in song, in prayer, and in their bones.
Black History Month is a celebration of that sacred resilience. It is a celebration of a people who refused to let their story be written by their oppressors. It is a celebration of people who insisted that their identity was not property but people who bear the image of God. It is a celebration of people people who carried a resurrection song in their bones. And that song is still being sung. Amen.
