Baptists and African Americans

By: Jewel L. Spangler

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Baptists and African Americans

No faith has been more closely associated with the African American community historically than the Baptist Church. In the colonial period sectarian Baptists were some of the first Christians to attract a significant African American following. Black Baptist adherence expanded so dramatically over time that by the end of the twentieth century Baptist churches could claim twice as many African American members as any other religious group.

In the colonial and early national periods, Baptists were defined primarily by their practice of administering the rite of baptism only to professed believers, by full immersion in water. They were also distinguished by their literal interpretation of the Bible, rejection of civil authority over religious matters, and distaste for church governmental hierarchy. African Americans first became Baptists in significant numbers on the eve of the American Revolution, but North American Baptists can trace their origins more generally to Britain in the early seventeenth century, when a few Dissenters, heavily influenced by Puritan separatists in Holland, gathered in London and practiced believer baptism. The first North American Baptist congregation formed in Rhode Island in the 1630s, and handfuls of European Baptist immigrants joined with new converts in North America to found several churches in a number of colonies thereafter. Religious quickening in the mideighteenth century produced a dramatic period of church building in the 1760s and 1770s that is particularly notable for spreading the Baptist faith southward to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The religious upheavals of the American Revolution then opened the way for the Baptists to move from the margins to the heart of the religious mainstream, particularly in the American South.

While a small number of African Americans had become members of Baptist churches in Rhode Island and Massachusetts by 1770, a sustained African American Baptist tradition developed with the rise of the Baptists in the southern colonies. That tradition originated in a biracial context. Many predominantly white southern churches included African American members during the Revolutionary era, and biracial worship continued to be common until the conclusion of the Civil War.

The meaning of biracial worship for African Americans is a matter of debate. Slaves and free blacks could find in Baptist worship not only the spiritual gratification and community connection that was important to all Baptists but also an egalitarian message in Baptist beliefs and worship practices that could attract and sustain an oppressed people. At the same time, biracial churches were firmly under the control of white congregants who discriminated against African American members and sometimes used the church to advance proslavery messages. Probably both to escape racism and to fully express their religious sensibilities, some African Americans developed separate, all-black Baptist churches, a process that dates to the colonial period.

In the Lower South a handful of African American religious leaders drove a rapid expansion of black Baptist institutions. George Liele, a slave from Georgia, is particularly notable in this regard. Converted in a biracial congregation, Liele preached extensively on plantations in his neighborhood, and his converts made up the core of a black congregation across the Savannah River in South Carolina, formally founded as Silver Bluff Church by a white preacher in 1775. Liele gained his freedom in the 1770s and traveled to Savannah, where his preaching produced enough African American converts to form a small congregation.

In the meantime, the disruptions of the American Revolution drove some congregants from Silver Bluff Church into Savannah. In 1788 one of Liele's followers, Andrew Bryan, organized Savannah Baptists into the First African Baptist Church. This church quickly expanded to include hundreds of members, joined the Georgia Baptist Association, and produced at least two other all-black congregations in Savannah by 1803—the Second Colored Baptist Church and the Great Ogeechee Baptist Church. Another of Liele's converts, Jesse Peters (also known as Jesse Galphin), relocated from Silver Bluff to Augusta during the war, took up the pulpit, and organized Springfield Baptist Church in 1787. David George, a Silver Bluff Church member, carried Liele's mission beyond the southern colonies. He departed with the British to Nova Scotia, where he founded a black Baptist church and ultimately traveled to the British colony of Sierra Leone, spreading the Baptist faith on the African continent. George Liele himself relocated to Jamaica during the British evacuation and spent the remainder of his life spreading the Baptist faith to blacks in the Caribbean. Black Baptist practice thus might be described as a developing Atlantic world phenomenon by the early nineteenth century.

The first known black Baptist congregation in the Upper South, Bluestone Church, was formed on the plantation of William Byrd in 1758, in present-day Mecklenburg County, Virginia. Similar plantation Baptist churches came together in King and Queen County and Nottaway County in Virginia during and just after the American Revolution. The Virginia towns of Williamsburg, Portsmouth, and Petersburg all had black Baptist congregations by the early nineteenth century, which were followed shortly by the founding of churches in Richmond and Norfolk. The Upper South is probably most notable, however, for its prominent African American preachers—both Josiah Bishop and James Lemon ministered to predominantly white congregations for a time in the postwar years.

“The First Colored Baptist Church in North America,” frontispiece from a book of the same title by Reverend James M. Simms, Philadelphia, 1888. The church had been established in Savannah, Georgia, a century earlier, on 20 January 1788.

New York Public Library; Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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While the Baptist faith spread among African Americans most fully in the South, the early Republic witnessed the founding of black Baptist churches in the urban North as well. Thomas Paul stands out as a leader in this movement. He was the founding minister of Joy Street Baptist Church in Boston in 1805, and when blacks in New York City's Gold Street Baptist Church sought to withdraw to form their own congregation, Paul negotiated the process with resistant white congregants, producing the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1808. Philadelphia's First African Baptist Church was founded the same year. Black Baptist churches in America's seaport cities were particularly noteworthy for their secondary functions as schools and self-help organizations for African Americans.

By 1830 about forty-five black churches had been founded, some under African American leadership and some under the authority of white preachers; a significant number of African Americans continued to join biracial churches as well. Free blacks were central to the founding of black churches, particularly in urban areas, but slaves were also very actively involved in the process. As the borders of the United States extended westward, so, too, did separate black Baptist worship. Churches were founded in Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. Black Baptist congregations about which we have information were generally recognized as legitimate churches by the white Baptist community, but they were undoubtedly only part of the story of separate African American Baptist practice. Historians have widely acknowledged that independent African American worship, perceived as a threat to social control and to slavery, was subject to active suppression. The so-called invisible church—congregations that met informally and practiced clandestinely—sustained untold numbers of African Americans in the years before Emancipation.

Historians have debated the extent to which African Americans practiced a distinctive form of Baptist Christianity, tied to their African heritage. Some have argued that the Middle Passage—the journey of slaves from Africa to America—was so culturally damaging that few or no ties to any African beliefs or practices survived to be employed by Baptist converts. Others point to heightened emotionalism, emphasis upon bodily movement in worship, and active congregational participation in worship among African Americans as translated expressions of an African sacred cosmos. Most historians do agree, however, that conditions of enslavement and discrimination led African Americans to place special emphasis upon elements of Christianity that underscored spiritual equality, divine justice, and deliverance.

See also American Revolution; Baptism; Black Church; Discrimination; Free African Americans to 1828; George, David; Liele, George; Missionary Movements; Paul, Thomas; Religion; and Spirituality.

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