In 1912 the legislature of Saint Vincent passed the Shakerism Prohibition Ordinance, a law aimed squarely at the Spiritual Baptists, the African Caribbean church whose services filled with ringing bells, rhythmic clapping and the shaking of worshippers seized by the Spirit. The ordinance declared their meetings unlawful, empowered police to break up services and seize the tools of worship, and made leading a meeting a criminal offence. The official justification spoke of public health and order; the practical effect was to criminalise the one church the colony's poor had built entirely for themselves.
For half a century the faith survived underground. Congregations met at night in the mountains and by rivers, posted lookouts for the police, disguised services as wakes, and kept the central rite of mourning, the days long fast and visionary seclusion by which believers travel in the Spirit and return with a spiritual gift and rank. Leaders were fined and jailed into the 1950s.
Repeal came in 1965, moved by Ebenezer Joshua, the country's dominant politician of the era, and the once banned church stepped back into the open, its bishops, pointers and mothers taking their place in national life. The neighbouring ban in Trinidad, repealed in 1951, is commemorated there with a public holiday, and in Saint Vincent the Spiritual Baptists' survival is now taught as a foundation story of religious freedom in the state that once outlawed them.