Black Theology in the Americas (1492–present) Part 1

Part I. Foundations (1492–1800): Saints, Slaves, and Sovereigns

When Europeans set sail in 1492, they carried guns, trade goods, and catechisms. Enslaved Africans carried Qur’anic verses, rosaries, and ancestral memories. Wherever the ships landed, theology landed with them. And wherever Africans were taken—Peru, Brazil, Jamaica, Virginia—Black theology took root. It did not wait for seminaries, denominational boards, or university presses. It sprang up in hospitals and confraternities, in slave cabins and maroon camps, in whispered prayers in Arabic, and in Catholic rosaries said over drums.

Black theology in the Americas begins here: not in pulpits or printed tracts, but in the survival strategies of the displaced. Its earliest witnesses show that theology is not an abstract system but a weapon, a balm, and a blueprint for living free.¹

Catholic Saints and Brotherhoods

Consider St. Martín de Porres, born in Lima in 1579, the illegitimate son of an African-descended woman and a Spanish nobleman. He became a Dominican lay brother—ordination was out of reach in his time and place—and is remembered as a healer whose sanctity lay in mending bodies and reconciling communities. He fed the poor, treated the sick, and broke racial barriers not with slogans but with mercy. In his short vita, he emerges as a kind of proto–public health theologian: holiness as social medicine.²

Meanwhile, in Brazil, African Catholics formed Black Rosary confraternities—Irmandades de Nossa Senhora do Rosário. These brotherhoods were not merely devotional clubs; they were insurance societies, burial funds, and networks of mutual aid. They blended Marian devotion with African kinship systems.³ Theology here looked like a funeral paid for, a widow not left alone, a feast held in the midst of oppression. Faith meant community, and community meant survival.

Muslims in the Slave Trade

Not every African on the slave ships became Christian. Thousands were Muslim, and some left us precious texts. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, enslaved in Maryland in 1730, dictated his story after gaining his freedom in London. His narrative is not a Christian confession but an Islamic testimony—his refusal to abandon prayer and his longing for the Qur’an. In a world that assumed slavery stripped Africans of culture, Diallo insisted on dignity through faith.⁴

On Georgia’s Sapelo Island, Bilali Muhammad wrote from memory portions of Maliki Islamic law—the Bilali Document.⁵ Imagine the theological audacity: a Muslim enslaved on a rice plantation copying legal codes as if to say, My body may be owned, but my mind and my God are not.

A generation later, in 1831, Omar ibn Said in North Carolina wrote his autobiography in Arabic. He quoted the Qur’an, confessed faith in Allah, and lived a life that unsettled Christian attempts at total conversion.⁶ These Muslim voices expand our sense of “Black theology.” They remind us that the early Americas were not only sites of Christian struggle but also interreligious crossroads where enslaved Africans practiced theological resistance.

Maroon Sovereignty

And then there were those who refused bondage altogether. In Jamaica, the Maroons—runaway communities of Africans and their descendants—created free enclaves in the mountains. Their legendary leader, Queen Nanny, combined guerrilla strategy with African spiritual authority. To her followers, she was more than a military commander; she was a prophetess, wielding Obeah (ancestral power) as a theological claim that God and the ancestors sided with the enslaved in their flight toward freedom.⁷

Queen Nanny’s theology was not written in books but carved into the land she defended. Her message: the divine stands with the fugitive, the maroon, the one who refuses to be property.

Themes That Still Speak Today

If there is one theme running through these foundational voices, it is this: Black theology is survival made sacred. Whether through the sanctity of Martín de Porres, the confraternities’ collective care, the Muslim manuscripts, or Queen Nanny’s defiance, these early centuries show that theology was not ivory-tower speculation. It was healing, mutual aid, memory, and resistance.

The must-reads—Martín’s vita, the Bilali Document—are more than historical curiosities. They are blueprints. They remind us that faith, under conditions of violence and exile, can become a medicine, a legal brief, or a battle cry.

Today, when conversations about racial justice and religion risk becoming abstract, these early voices pull us back to the ground. They show that Black theology in the Americas began not with systematic treatises but with people insisting: we are still human, and God is with us.

Notes

1. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 6–9.

2. Celia Cussen, Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Martín de Porres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 21–45.

3. Elizabeth Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005), 15–40.

4. Vincent Carretta, The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 63–70; see also Vincent Carretta, The Life of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

5. Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1997), 98–112.

6. Omar ibn Said, The Life of Omar ibn Said, Written by Himself (1831), Library of Congress Manuscript Division; Ala Alryyes, ed., A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar ibn Said (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

7. Karla Gottlieb, The Mother of Us All: A History of Queen Nanny, Leader of the Windward Jamaican Maroons (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000); Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988).

Bibliography

Alryyes, Ala, ed. A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar ibn Said. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
Austin, Allan D. African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Campbell, Mavis C. The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988.
Carretta, Vincent. The Life of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Cussen, Celia. Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Martín de Porres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Gottlieb, Karla. The Mother of Us All: A History of Queen Nanny, Leader of the Windward Jamaican Maroons. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000.
Kiddy, Elizabeth. Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Said, Omar ibn. The Life of Omar ibn Said, Written by Himself. 1831. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.