Black Sects and Cults

This series of books is about the black religious experience. It is addressed to Blackamericans because the rich heritage that is their history has not been made fully available to them in the usual ways in which a society informs its membership about the significant aspects of its development. Blackamericans want to know —indeed they must know— more about who they were and who they are if they are seriously concerned about whom they intend to become. The black man's religion is a critical component of his American passage from slavery to a freedom which is still to be perfected. This series is addressed to white America, too. The black experience —religious, social, economic, political— is writ large in the cultural development of the larger society. Understanding it is crucial to an informed perspective of what America is or can become. To a desree not always recognized, America is what it is because the black minority is here, and has been here since long before this nation came into being. The blacks brought their religion with them. After a time they accepted the white man's religion, but they have not always expressed it in the white man's way. It became the black man's purpose —perhaps it was his destiny— to shape, to fashion, to re-create the religion offered him by the Christian slave master, to remold it nearer to his own heart's desire, nearer to his own peculiar needs. The black religious experience is something more than a black patina on a white happening. It is a unique response to a historical occurrence which can never be replicated for any people in America.