Forming their own churches after the war was important to African Americans because during slavery they had to attend to their services in secrecy.
That is when blacks could express themselves in a free way in their churches and communities. Of course, they could better do so in the Northern states because, in the South, they still were living mane segregational situations. Freed African Americans founded their own churches that in one way or another allowed them to have a place of their own to pray, meet, and help each other.
The cartoon's shadows suggest that some people living in the United States — especially the wealthy — perhaps had forgotten where they came from and that their families were once immigrants just like the new arrival in the cartoon.
