We're looking at the history of watch night, a New Year's Eve tradition for Black Americans that goes back to the Civil War.

By keeping watch, Black communities transformed a single night of waiting into a living theology of freedom. They taught time to remember. They taught faith to speak history aloud. In a nation that ...

On the night of December 31, 1862, African Americans of all social classes gathered in secret to observe Watch Night, a religious tradition of collective reflection and anticipation of the ...