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Evangelical Networks in the Greater Caribbean and the Origins of the Black Church

Part of: Looking Forward, Looking Back: Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2010

John W. Catron
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Extract

Henry Beverhout looked out over the West African village of Freetown in 1792 with misgivings. From his own experience and from the complaints he received from other townspeople, he now recognized that the black men and women of Sierra Leone were not being afforded the equal treatment they had been promised. Exploited and discriminated against for most of their lives by white masters in America, these expatriates had arrived in West Africa determined to chart a new course for themselves. But the path to economic, civil, and religious freedom was littered with obstacles. They soon encountered problems with white Sierra Leone Company officials over low pay, high prices, and the slow pace at which land was apportioned to the new settlers. Just as important, the black émigrés were dismayed by the company's system of justice, whose juries Beverhout said did not “haven aney of our own Culler in” them. Having absorbed the British and American legal traditions of trial by a jury of one's peers, he demanded that in any “trial thear should be a jurey of both white and black and all should be equal.” Going even further, he then made the explosive claim that “we have a wright to Chuse men that we think proper to act for us in a reasnenble manner.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 77 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2010

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