This paper looks at nineteenth-century Black Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union, Kentucky to investigate how those Shakers helped shape their communities, and particularly their communities’ responses to enslavement and inequality. Despite increasing interest, there is woefully little historical research on Black believers, participants, and observers. Scholars of Shakers tend to make similar arguments: Shakers were pacifists, opposed to enslavement, and committed to racial equality. This portrayal of Shakers is not wrong, but it is not quite right. Shaker communities had diverse and complex approaches to Black members, and Black participants in Shaker communities were at times deeply committed, and at times deeply critical of the Society, and often both. African American Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union developed communities of critique that helped shape their Shaker communities.