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THE EVOLUTION OF THE NEGRO BAPTIST CHURCH
The freedom and local democracy of the Baptist Church enabled the
Negroes to participate in the affairs thereof much earlier than they were so
indulged in the other denominations. Pioneer Negro preachers and churches,
therefore, first appeared in the Baptist Church. The development of the
attitude of the Baptist Church toward the Negro, however, has been by cycles.
The relations of the two races in church matters differ widely from what they
were years ago. Members of both races formerly belonged to the same
congregation, which in the beginning in this country ignored social
distinctions. They have since then undergone radical changes to reach the
present situation in which they have all but severed connection with each
other.
In the beginning, the attitude of the so-called Christian whites
toward the early Negro preachers was that of hostility. This opposition,
however, did not come from the Baptists themselves, but from the master class.
George Liele in the West Indies, Andrew Bryan in Georgia, and David George in
Canada had much difficulty in their pioneer work, suffering many indignities
and hardships. Andrew Bryan was whipped in a cruel and bloody manner but
triumphed over persecution by his bold declaration that he was willing to die
for Jesus. Rev. Mr. Moses, working in Virginia about this time, was often
arrested and whipped for holding meetings. Others were excommunicated, but
such opposition could not stay the progress of the work, for these pioneer
preachers finally succeeded. This is attested by the resolution of the white
Baptist Association expressing deep regret on the occasion of the death of
Andrew Bryan. 1
1 The resolution was: "The association is sensibly affected by the
death of the Rev. Andrew Bryan, a man of color, and pastor of the first
colored Church in Savannah. This son of Africa, after suffering inexpressible
persecutions in the cause of his Divine Master, was at length permitted to
discharge the duties of the ministry among his colored friends in peace and
quiet, hundreds of whom, through his instrumentality, were brought to the
knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus. He closed his extensively useful,
and amazingly luminous course, in the lively exercise of faith, and in the
joyful hope of a happy immortality." See Benedict's History of the Baptists.
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When the Baptists had won a standing after the grant of toleration
in the United States and Negroes began to connect themselves with them, the
status of the blacks in the Baptist Church had to be determined. Was the Negro
to be a mere member in the back seat or a participant in the work of the
Church? Under the labors of inspired white men thousands of Negroes were
converted, baptized, set apart as churches, and instructed in all things which
pertain to a life becoming the gospel of Christ. White persons, on the other
hand, have been converted through the preaching of Negroes, and a few Negroes,
even in the Southland, have been pastors of white Baptist churches. Speaking
of the resignation of Mr. Thomas Armistead, who was pastor of the Portsmouth
Church, in Virginia, until 1792, Robert B. Semple, in his History of the
Baptists of Virginia, remarks: "After his resignation the church declined
greatly. They employed Josiah Bishop, a black man of considerable talents, to
preach to them. This, as might have been expected, could not answer in
Virginia." 2
2 Semple, History of the Baptists in Virginia, p. 355.
Another instance of the same character is related by Mr. Semple, in
connection with the Pettsworth or Gloucester Church. In his statement in
regard to the death of Rev. Robert Hudgin, their first pastor, he observes
that "This church continued to prosper moderately until Mr. Hudgin's death.
They were then left without any person to go in and out before them. They at
length did what it would hardly have been supposed would have been done by
Virginians; they chose for their pastor William Lemon, a man of color." "He
also died after several years. Since then," remarks Mr. Semple, "they have
been destitute of
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stated ministerial aid." Here, then, is a man of color, who was pastor of a
white Baptist Church in Virginia to the day of his death, covering a period of
"several years." 3
3 Semple, History of the Baptists in Virginia, p. 356.
There is still another case, in which the order of things is
reversed, and this the most remarkable in the history of the South. In 1798
there appeared in southwest Mississippi a colored Baptist preacher, Joseph
Willis, a mulatto, who being duly licensed was very zealous to exercise his
gift as a minister. In 1804 he crossed the Mississippi River and began a work
into which he put a half century of earnest endeavor. After preaching at
Vermillion and Plaquemine Brulé for eight years, amidst hardships and bitter
persecutions, unaided and alone, and sacrificing a small fortune in the
struggle, he was able, with the aid of visiting ministers, to constitute the
first Baptist Church at Bayou Chicot. Other churches, the fruits of his
labors, soon sprang into being, and in 1818 the Louisiana Baptist Association
was constituted, with these churches as a nucleus. Joseph Willis was pastor of
the church at Bayou Chicot for a number of years. As moderator of the
Louisiana Baptist Association he was honored and respected -- indeed, beloved
and spoken of as "Father Willis." That a Negro should have the honor of giving
to Louisiana its first mixed Baptist church and of being the pastor of that
church -- that a Negro was the first moderator of Louisiana's first white
Baptist association, 4
4 The Negro Year Book, 1918-1919, p. 236; Benedict, History of the
Baptists, 376.
and rendered the denomination fifty years of service, causes us greatly to
marvel in these days of race division and race antipathy.
The Negro members of white Baptist churches of this country were,
as a rule, permitted to worship with their white brethren within certain fixed
limits. The gap between them, however, tended to widen. Later they were
allowed another hour for worship, with large bounds and privileges. Still
later they were provided with all the privileges of the Baptist meeting house
under the restrictions
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of the white churches to which they belonged. The master class gradually
reached the position of separating the races in worship, but for the security
of slavery they deemed it wise to hold the Negroes as members of the white
churches.
It was argued that, in all nature, living creatures move
instinctively in groups after their kind, and that the Negro and the white
man, left to themselves, do the same thing, as is evidenced by the fact that
the black slave was ever offending against the institution of slavery by
holding religious services after his own liking where only his own people were
present and shared in the devotion. In this manner the master justified
himself in segregating his slave in the house of God and pointed to the Court
of the Gentiles, in the Temple of Jehovah, in confirmation of the
righteousness of his act. But for some reason the untutored black slave was
never entirely at home in the white man's church, with its special place for
Negroes. He knew that the master could be at ease in any part of his church
edifice. It was all his and he moved about through its aisles as a free man,
but the slave was limited in his privileges, and was counted a good man only
as he kept within the limits assigned him.
When the Negroes in the white Baptist churches of the South became
very numerous, services for their special benefit were held in the church
edifices, usually in the afternoon, by the pastor and other persons who felt a
deep interest in them. In these meetings the colored members of the church not
only enjoyed the freedom of the place for the time being, but often listened
with great satisfaction to the exhortations of one or more of their own
brethren who spoke by permission from the floor and not from the pulpit
platform. These Negro exhorters were encouraged to exercise a measure of
spiritual oversight in the midst of their brethren and so help the church and
pastor in caring for the flock. The segregated group, in a separate church
edifice, meeting for worship at the
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same hours as the parent body, gave rise to the separate church altogether,
with a white ministry. In this way many of the largest and most progressive
Negro Baptist churches of the South had their beginnings amid the vicissitudes
of life peculiar to a land of human bondage. The African Baptist Church of
Richmond, Virginia, under the direction of Dr. Robert Ryland, the white
president of Richmond College, is a case in evidence.
Still another type of Negro Baptist church arose where there was no
parent church of white persons in control of the offspring. There were
churches of this character in Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, the British
West Indies, Canada, and in far-off Africa, before the close of the eighteenth
century. In these churches the members were of the black race. In Virginia and
in Georgia churches of this class as well as others were admitted to
membership in the oldest and best white Baptist associations, in which they at
one time were given considerable attention. 5
5 By way of comparison, be it further remembered, that the founder
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church was originally a member of the St.
George Society, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he and others withdrew from
that body of white persons in 1787; but it was not until 1794, that Bishop
Francis Asbury constituted the Bethel A. M. E. Church at Philadelphia, which
claims to be the oldest Negro Methodist church in the country. The Zion
Church, of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion connection, New York City, was
founded in 1796, while the first church of Negro Episcopalians, the St. Thomas
Church, Philadelphia, was planted by Bishop William White in 1794. The Lombard
Street Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, the oldest organization of Negro
Presbyterians in America, was constituted in 1807, and not until 1829 was the
first church of Negro Congregationalists, the Dixwell Avenue of New Haven,
Conn., constituted.
It is worthy of note that Negro Baptist churches of this type were the first
Negro Baptist churches in all the land and preceded by many years the first
Negro churches of other denominations in America.
These churches, moreover, soon established themselves in spite of
opposition, for they were accepted by the Baptist associations. The Negro
Baptist Church organized at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, in 1773 or 1775,
probably had no such connection, nor did that of George Liele in
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Savannah, established not long thereafter; but the Negro Baptist Church of
Williamsburg, Virginia, sought membership in the Dover Association in 1791 and
was accepted. This church, according to John W. Cromwell, who is himself a
Methodist, was founded in the year 1776. In 1815 the Gillfield Baptist Church,
of Petersburg, Virginia, a Negro congregation, united with the Portsmouth
Association, an organization of white Baptists. Shortly after doing so this
church invited the association to hold its approaching annual meeting with the
Gillfield Baptist Church. The "invitation was accepted and the church
appointed a committee to rent stables and to buy feed for the delegates'
horses." Richard Kennard, from whose church record we quote, adds: "A
committee was also appointed to furnish blacking and brushes with which to
clean the delegates' boots and shoes, and to see to the general comfort of the
delegates." We agree with Mr. Kennard in the reflection: "At that age there
did not seem to be as much prejudice among Christians or as much separation as
since." 6
6 Richard Kennard's History of the Gillfield Baptist Church, p. 16.
The second step in the development was that of expansion abroad.
There had been planted Negro Baptist churches, like the First African Baptist
Church of Augusta, Georgia, in 1793, and Amos's Church at New Providence,
Bahama Islands, British West Indies, in 1788. George Liele carried the work of
the Baptists into Jamaica in 1784; and David George extended it to Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick and finally into Sierra Leone about the same time. In this
connection it may be remarked that because a Baptist church can arise and
continue to exist as a self-originating, self-governing body without any
consent or approval from without, the work of the denomination rapidly
expanded. White ministers fully ordained to the ministry Negro Baptists, Negro
Episcopalians, and Negro Presbyterians and inducted them into pastorates, at a
time when the Methodist Episcopal Church in America was not at first inclined
to do
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so. This denomination, therefore, brought about that condition which
resulted in the setting up of an independent African Methodist denomination
under Peter Spencer in 1812, of another under Richard Allen in 1816, and still
another under James Varick in 1820.
It should be remarked, moreover, that all Negro Baptist churches,
except those in the South, which came out of white churches during slavery,
had Negro pastors. Yet whatever their differences, Negro Baptists and white
Baptists in America constituted one family until after the Civil War. Indeed
there has never been any formal separation of the two groups. Each has simply
followed the race instinct, in an age of freedom, while the one group
cooperates with the other, North and South.
There were Negro Baptist churches in the South for more than a
quarter of a century before they began to be constituted in the North, and
about a half century before the first church of the kind was planted in the
West. When in 1805, moreover, the first African Baptist church was organized
at Boston, Massachusetts, it was not only the first Negro Baptist church in
the North, but was also the only independent Negro church north except the St.
Thomas Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, which had a Negro rector. That Boston
African Baptist church had for its pastor a Negro, the Rev. Thomas Paul, a man
of such intelligence and piety, such commanding presence and pleasing address,
that pulpits everywhere in Massachusetts and in his native State of New
Hampshire, were open to him, both before and after he became a minister in
that city.
In the course of time Negro Baptist churches tended to associate
among themselves, as they developed power independently of the white churches.
There were in the South during the Negro enslavement, however, no Negro
Baptist associations which embraced their churches in any State or in any
considerable part of a State; for all Negro Baptist churches were associated
with white Baptist churches in the South. The "Richmond African Baptist
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Missionary Society," which was constituted at Richmond, Virginia, in 1815,
was no exception to the rule. Lott Cary, 6
6 Let me quote here a paragraph from Sprague's Annals of the
American Pulpit, Vol. VI, p. 583, (Ed. 1860, published by Robert Carter and
Brother, New York.) The paragraph appears in an article which the publisher
takes from Taylor's Memoirs. -- Missionary Heroes and Martyrs.
"In 1850, the late Rev. Eli Ball of Virginia, visited all the
Liberian Baptists Missionary Stations, as agent of the Southern Baptist
Missionary Convention, and, with considerable difficulty, ascertained the spot
where Lott Cary was buried. The next year, a small marble monument was sent
out, and placed over the grave, with the following inscription: --
"On the front of the monument was --
LOTT CARY Born a slave in Virginia 1780, Removed from Richmond to
Africa, as a Missionary and Colonist, 1821, Was Pastor of the First Baptist
Church, and an original settler and defender of the Colony at Monrovia. Died
Acting Governor of Liberia Nov. 10th, 1828. His life was the progressive
development of an able intellect and firm benevolent heart, under the
influence of Freedom and an enlightened Christianity; and affords the amplest
evidence of the capacity of his race to fill with dignity and usefulness the
highest ecclesiastical and political stations. Of a truth God is no respecter
of persons, But hath made of one blood all nations of men,
On the reverse --
Lott Cary's self-denying, self-sacrificing labors, as a self-taught
Physician, as a Missionary and Pastor of a Church, and finally as Governor of
the Colony, have inscribed his name indelibly on the page of history, not only
as one of Nature's Noblemen, but as an eminent Philanthropist and Missionary
of Jesus Christ.
'Aye, call it holy ground, The place where first they trod; They
sought what here they found, Freedom to worship God.'"
That is, indeed, a remarkable utterance, coming from the Southern
Baptist Missionary Convention, in the year b. 1851.
the chief spirit in that organization, and Mr. William
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Crane, a white merchant, its corresponding secretary, were members of the
same church -- not a Negro Baptist church, for there was no organization of
the kind in Richmond at the time. Lott Cary was converted under the preaching
of a white pastor. At the hands of that white pastor he was baptized, into the
fellowship of the white church of which that pastor was the spiritual leader
Lott Cary was received, and from that white church, the First Baptist Church
of Richmond, Virginia, Lott Cary went to plant the standard of Christ on the
shores of Africa.
Negro Baptist associations in this country were the achievements of
free men on free soil. The Providence Association of Ohio, organized in 1833,
and the Wood River Association of Illinois, organized in 1838, led the way.
The colored Baptist churches of the North and East organized in 1840, and the
abolition of slavery as an American institution resulted in the nation-wide
formation of Negro churches, local associations, State conventions, and larger
groups. In 1866 a national convention which merged the forces of the North and
South, the East and West, under the significant, name, "The Consolidated
American Baptist Missionary Convention," was organized. Its chief work was in
the South and confined to the period of Reconstruction. In 1873 the West
revived its organization under the name, "The Baptist General Association of
the Western States and Territories," and the Northern churches did likewise in
1875 in the formation of "The New England Baptist Missionary Society." Each
enlarged its borders until the two embraced the greater part of the whole
country. In 1880 the Negro Baptists of the country formed their first national
society to do work in foreign lands exclusively. The organization constituted
at this time took the name, "The Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the
United States."
In 1886, at St. Louis, Missouri, the National Baptist Convention
was formed, and the work of this organization was subsequently so modified
that in it is unified all the
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national and international church work in which Negro Baptists of America
were engaged. These efforts toward organization, however, were not altogether
satisfactory, for the Baptists soon developed a factional struggle in regard
to the question as to independent action or cooperation with the American
Baptist Foreign Mission Society and the American Baptist Home Mission Society.
In 1897, in the Shiloh Baptist Church, Washington, D. C., the Lott Cary
Baptist Foreign Missionary Convention was formed by certain churches in the
Atlantic States which looked with disfavor on the independent mission work as
conducted by the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention.
Composed chiefly of men and women who were educated in the schools of the
American Baptist Home Mission Society, this organization has from the first
cooperated with Northern Baptists in the prosecution of its work.
At Chicago in 1915 there arose a more serious division in the
forces of the National Baptist Convention as the result of differences of
opinion in regard to the ownership of the Convention in the lands and chattels
of its Publishing Board. As a result of these differences there have developed
two groups of colored Baptists in this country, engaged in similar work, and
each claims to be the National Baptist Convention -- the original and only
National Baptist Convention of Negro Baptists in America.
One of the results of the association of Negro churches has been
education. Negro Baptists in a land of slavery were not supposed to be versed
in the knowledge of books. But inasmuch as master and slave were instructed
out of the same inspired writings Sabbath after Sabbath, the slave quite
frequently was as familiar with the Bible as his master. Ignorance and
illiteracy are not one and the same thing. An unlettered people may be learned
in the word of God, and being made wise unto salvation, may present to the
world no mean type of Christian life. Apart from the knowledge received
through the regular preaching of the gospel by the best preachers of the
Southland,
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it was not unlawful to impart verbal instruction to slaves, in Sunday
school exercises and, under other circumstances, in regard to any number of
things which have to do with conduct and character and human comfort, so long
as nothing was said to endanger the institution of slavery. But some Baptists
appear to have given some measure of literary training to Negroes attached to
their churches. Andrew Bryan, in one of his letters to Dr. John Rippon of
London, England, in 1800, speaks, of the fact that certain friends in
Savannah, Georgia, had purchased a man of color of many excellent qualities,
the Rev. Henry Francis, and had given him his freedom that he might be a
teacher to his people. Bryan himself then opened a school for the slaves on
his plantation outside of Savannah. George Liele established a school in
connection with his church in Jamaica, hoping to develop the minds of his
communicants that he might properly edify their souls.
The First Baptist Church (white), Richmond, Virginia, moreover,
conducted a school for the literary training and instruction of its Negro
members. For several years Lott Cary was a student in this institution. The
church at Williamsburg, Virginia, which was a Negro Baptist church from its
beginning, that is, from 1776, must have done something for education, for it
kept correct church records, in the handwriting of its own members. Many of
the Negro Baptist preachers of the South, moreover, obtained some degree of
scholarship by private instruction and so won the respect of the people among
whom they lived. The close of the Civil War brought together a group of
scholarly men, from the North and West, men of purpose and consecration,
preachers of great power who were an inspiration to their less cultured and
less scholarly brethren in the South, and these invaded our Southland to help
forward the new order of things in the churches as well as in civil life.
To-day the Negro Baptists of America have more than
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20,000 churches, with about two and a half million members and church
property valued at more than forty million dollars. They are conducting orphan
schools, homes for the aged poor, and institutions of learning, and are as
zealous as ever in sending the gospel to people in foreign lands. Great has
been the progress of Negro Baptists in America, but that progress was due in
very great measure to Northern philanthropy during a quarter of a century
after the Civil War and is promoted also to-day by the good will of Southern
Baptists who have put at the disposal of Negro Baptists in the South thousands
of dollars. But the greatest glory of Negro Baptists is the spirit of
self-help and heroic sacrifice in the endeavor to help others, and that spirit
is now everywhere prevalent.
WALTER H. BROOKS
"Used with permission of The University Library, The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill."
