Why were Black ministers outlawed in Southern states?

You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

It shows Nat Turner (1800-1831).

Nat Turner formed an army approximately of 70 African-Americans, who traveled from house to house, freeing people from slavery, and killing at least 55 slave owners and their family members, starting August 21, 1831, in Virginia.

Turner’s army ran out of ammunition; many were executed.

The Virginia legislature panicked. They even debated whether slavery should end.

Over 100,000 white males were pulled into militias. Virginia’s total population was only 1,211,405.

This is a direct quote from Nat:

"My grand mother, who was very religious, and to whom I was much attached - my master, who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon intelligence for a child, remarked I had too much sense to be raised - and if I was, I would never be of any service to any one - as a slave..."

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W.E.B. DuBois wrote about the white panic that seized the nation after Nat Turner's rebellion:

"A wave of legislation passed over the South prohibiting the slaves from learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering with Negro religious meetings. Virginia declared, in 1831, that neither slaves or free Negroes might preach, nor could they attend religious service at night without permission.

"In North Carolina slaves and free Negroes were forbidden to preach, exhort or teach 'in any prayer-meeting or other association for worship where slaves of different families are collected together' on penalty of not more than thirty-nine lashes. Maryland and Georgia had similar laws. The Mississippi law of 1831 said: It is 'unlawful for any slave, free Negro, or mulatto to preach the gospel' upon pain of receiving thirty-nine lashes upon the naked back of the presumptuous preacher. If a Negro received written permission from his master he might preach to the Negroes in his immediate neighborhood, providing six respectable white men, owners of slaves, were present (Williams II, 163).

"In Alabama the law of 1832 prohibited the assembling of more than five male slaves at any place off the plantation to which they belonged, but nothing in the act was to be considered as forbidding attendance at places of public worship held by white persons. No slave or free person of color was permitted to 'preach, exhort, or harangue any slave or slaves, or free persons of color, except in the presence of five respectable slaveholders or unless the person preaching was licensed by some regular body of professing Christians in the neighborhood, to whose society or church the Negroes addressed properly belonged.' "

--quoted from "Toussaint L'Ouverture, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey & Nat Turner", by W.E.B. DuBois, from Chapter 9 of his book entitled "Negro Church", published in 1903 by Atlanta University Press.

You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

It shows Dr. W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Ph.D., Harvard University, 1896.
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