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]
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]
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
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]
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] 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 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 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] 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 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]
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 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. The 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's 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 Missionary Society," which was
constituted at Richmond, Virginia, in 1815, was no exception to the
rule. Lott Cary,[6] the chief spirit in that organization, and Mr.
William 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 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, 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 white 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 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.