Why do you think religion played such a central role in the black community?

The majority of African Americans living in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century were enslaved, working as forced laborers on farms in the American South and West.Although slave owners denied them their basic rights and liberties, enslaved people resisted slavery through small acts of defiance as well as large-scale uprisings.Free people of color lived in cities in the North and the Upper South. They played a prominent role in the growing abolition movement of the early nineteenth century.

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