Secluded Glory: The Black Church and Brush Harbors in the Rural South

Abstract

In this talk, I focus on the making of place through impermanent structures, brush harbors. Brush harbors were worship structures built by enslaved Black people in the U.S. South. They were often constructed in forests, and made out of leaves, sticks and whatever “brush” they could surmise. Within brush harbors, the enslaved practiced their religion and spiritual traditions. While Christianity was forced on the enslaved, freedom was practiced in brush harbors through a mixture of West African spiritual practices like shouting and conjuring and Christianity. What developed in brush harbors was the earliest iterations of the "black church" as an institution.

In this talk, I argue the brush harbor gives us the opportunity to theorize from the moment of uncertainty and pause, but also through the natural landscape. Methodologically, I use the Works Progress Administration Surveys (WPA) between 1936 and 1937 to document the existence of brush harbor churches in rural South Carolina. In South Carolina’s digitized records, WPA workers code churches as “negro” (boldly denoted in red) or white. The survey is extensive and covers churches in 42 of SC’s 46 counties during those years. I also travel home, to the site of those brush harbors to Bamberg County, SC to visit their location and begin to consider what historically mapping these places might look like.