Black churches were at the center of remaking the United States’ post-Civil War political system into one that incorporated formerly enslaved black men into the body politic and revised the legal code to provide civil rights to these new citizens. Black Baptist and Episcopal Churches of Virginia provide insight into how black people began to access the levers of political change. These black Christians recrafted their communities in alignment with the extant practice around who could be included in the body politic (men), while determining on what terms (some form of racial and political or civic equality) and by what means (on the basis of networks and political representation). In this way the black Baptist and Episcopal Churches played an important role in advancing biracial democracy.
Upon emancipation, the civil and political rights and responsibilities of black men and women had yet to be defined. And while participants in the freedmen conventions relatively easily identified voting rights as a goal, black churches immediately became sites in which church members worked out the terms of internal and external political participation in ways that reinforced the larger political transformation of emancipation. The exclusion of women from the decision-making, officeholding, and visible leadership posts in church meetings and conventions was an area where the overlap in the internal politics of churches and the external politics of the state became evident. While some women, through their roles as teachers, were able to exercise authority “without visibly disrupting male leadership,” other women were simply excluded from positions of authority altogether. This happened in the Gilfield Baptist Church when women, who in 1868 were permitted to bring men to be disciplined in cases of unwed pregnancy, were in 1870 denied the right to do so on the basis that the practice was unscriptural and damaging to the community. In an effort to establish respectability and biblical fidelity, this church adopted practices that excluded women from leadership and decision-making roles. The practice overlapped with and was reinforced by the federal government’s policies, other social organizations, and black communities’ own practices of protecting black women from violence by keeping them at home or in school. Above all, it coincided with the seemingly inexorable push to secure voting rights for Black men.