"Guilty Partners": Black Churches, Black Freedom, and Black Sexuality in Postemancipation Virginia

This paper explores the ways in which black churches shaped ideas and practices about sexuality, marriage and gender during the postemancipation transition to freedom. Churches like the Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia and other Southside congregations were the primary places where free and freedmen and women constituted and reconstituted new communities of freedom. These religious spaces were also among the places where free and freedmen began to negotiate their place within the larger American political context, and as local, family-based institutions these churches also shaped ideas about male-female relationships, roles and sexuality, a key concern of these churches during this time. This paper places an examination of African Americans' evolving ideas about sexuality and gender within the context of emancipation's political transformation and in so doing demonstrates how sexuality and gender were part of the project and process of becoming free.