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2 Christianity has been a central part of the African-American experience since Southern slaveholders sought to use it as one more means of control over their chattel property. Where plantation owners focused on passages that supported slavery and encouraged obedience to a master, their slaves found meaning in the story of Moses, who led enslaved Israelites to freedom. As spirituals played an integral role in the operation of the Underground Railroad and provided comfort during a bloody civil war, it was only natural that Christianity would be a significant component for blacks beginning new lives as freedmen. For the first time, former slaves were able to organize formal churches, first meeting in houses and later building churches in the South. The end of Reconstruction created a much more dangerous landscape for newly freed blacks, though, and many moved north to escape political persecution from Democrats and ter-rorism from the Ku Klux Klan. In particular, the Baptist and Methodist faiths played central roles in the experience of black freedmen building their own churches immediately after the Civil War. Most studies on the character of black Protestant churches focus on the black branches of the Baptist church, as wel