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In understanding the history of African Americans in the African Americas it is impossible to not understand the function and role of religion in black culture. Religiousness has been an enduring characteristic of black life in the African Americas, and religious institutions play an important role in African American communities. As Gayraud Wilmore asserts: From the earliest days of their captivity in the New World, the transplanted Africans, denied access to other forms of self-affirmation and group power, have used religion and religious institutions as the principal expression of their peoplehood and their will both to exist and to improve their situation. Black religion, fluctuating between protest and accomodation, and protesting in the context of accomodation strategies, has contributed considerably to the ability of Afro-Americans to survive the worst forms of dehumanization and oppression. Beyond, survival, as leaders and followers became more sophisticated about how to use religion, it has helped them to free themselves, first from slavery, then from civil inequality and subordination, to go to greater heights of personal and group achievement.1 Religion and religious institutions, though not always correctly addressing the development of the black community, nevertheless served as a significant foundation for the strategies of survival of the black community.2 And this is precisely the aim of these religions and religious expressions, the survival of the black community. One needs to understand that the issue of survival was a very real one for the early African American community. The institution of chattel slavery in the Americas reduced the African American person to a commodity, to a thing that its owners could exploit to their full advantage and capital profit. In this latter sense, as James Cone puts it "There are no assets to slavery".3 Attempts to portray slavery as a necessary crucible out of which black folk emerged stronger and more steadfast, or as a paternalistic institution in |