ing from the North. Here and there, the slave preachers decided to do something about it. In virtually every major revolt in the antebellum South, a black preacher, or the folk equivalent, was the organizational cadre.
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It is easy to see the progression that led Du Bois to observe in 1939, through what Stuckey termed "a leap of intuition based mainly on concrete experiences," (Stuckey, p. 255) that as "the slave preacher replaced to some extent the African medicine man ... gradually, after a century or more, the Negro Church arose as the center and almost the only social expression of Negro life in America" (W. E. Burghardt Du Bois,
Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race,
1939, p. 198). Ultimately, this would affect American political life in a massive way, in which the critical role of the black preacher in, for example, the civil rights struggle, was as remarkable as the strange denial of the African religion which pre-figured it. By 1963, old line theorists of the "Negro Church" were insisting, as did E. Franklin Frazier (
The Negro Church in America
, 1963), "It is impossible to establish any continuity between African religious practices and the Negro Church in the United States. In America the destruction of the clan and kinship organization ... plunged Negroes into an alien civilization in which whatever remained of their religious myths and cults had no meaning whatever.... It is our position that it was not what remained of African culture or African religious experience but the Christian religion that would provide the new basis of social cohesion" (p. 13).
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The overwhelming evidence, however, points to African culturenot European Christianityas the most potent link among African slaves, and the extension of Christianity a purposeful fifth column designed to co-opt revolutionary ideology. "The inescapable conclusion [is] that the nationalism of the slave community was essentially African nationalism, consisting of val-
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