While the independent churches and the mutual-benefit societies contributed to the separation of the races, they were also refuges from white supremacy. While they functioned in part as an accommodation to the realities of American race prejudice and discrimination, they were also an assertion of black independence and racial self-respect. To blacks whose ambitions were crushed by caste, they offered opportunities for self-expression and the development of leadership. Prominent figures in the churches and fraternal societies were from the beginning ardent advocates of equal rights and abolition. In the generation before the Civil War they provided leadership both in the separate Negro Convention Movement and in the interracial abolitionist societies. Prior to the rise of militant anti-slavery they had also made a significant contribution to black education (109).
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