First African Baptist Church Hebrew Writing

Preparing for Emancipation

The First African Church

In the years before and during the Civil War, enslaved people used religion as a means of preparing for freedom. Often allowed to attend segregated sections of white Protestant churches, they heard from white ministers the New Testament's promise of salvation. It was a lesson intended to pacify them with an "otherworldly" salvation rather than instill hope in earthly freedom. Enslaved preachers had a different vision, however. Speaking in darkened plantation quarters, more openly in religious meeting places known as "praise houses" (usually hidden away in secluded rural areas), and even in formal settings such as Petersburg's First Baptist Church and Richmond's First African Baptist Church, they taught Black people how to use genuine professions of faith in Christian salvation to camouflage simultaneous expressions of belief in imminent political freedom.

African American Shopkeeper in Richmond

African American conceptions of Christianity provided a language for resisting slavery. In addition to seeing themselves in the Israelites who escaped Egypt, they read the Book of Revelation as narrating the apocalyptic end of one world and the inauguration of a new, more just one. African Americans often blended political and spiritual symbols, combining, for instance, the characters of Abraham Lincoln, Moses, and Jesus into one messianic persona, and celebrating the abolition of slavery as a day of Jubilee—a Hebrew concept that coupled freedom with the acquisition of land. In fact, African American communities frequently created Jubilee celebrations on the Fourth of July to commemorate the Declaration of Independence as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.

Convention of the Colored People of Virginia

First Baptist Church of Manchester

Alienated from nearly all other institutions while enslaved, newly freed African Americans formed Christian churches or joined long-established ones. Making full use of educated clergymen, they found churches to be ideal locations to advance civil rights and create alliances with like-minded secular groups. As many as 80 percent of African Americans belonged to a church in postwar Virginia, most of them identifying as Baptist. A scant few African Americans in the state were Roman Catholic, with a Richmond parish placed under the direction of the Josephite Fathers of London, a society of Catholic priests and brothers devoted to caring for the spiritual and material needs of freedpeople in the United States. Nor were a significant number of African Americans non-Christian in the sense of identifying with or regularly attending Jewish synagogues or Muslim mosques.

These Christian churches became sites of protest against racist Virginia policies, including white reluctance to extend the franchise to Blacks after the state rejoined the Union. For example, several Christian ministers organized the Convention of the Colored People of Virginia in Alexandria in August 1865, drawing delegates from twenty-two mostly urban districts throughout the state. In speech after speech, leaders demanded equal rights with white citizens, including the right of suffrage.

Pardon. Franchise.

The convention's rationale for equality cited Blacks' devotion to the nation's most fundamental republican principles—freedom and equality. Leaders argued that since the American Revolution (1775–1783), Blacks had taken up arms over and over again to defend or extend these ideals. And they believed their service during the Civil War made them—and not white secessionists—the most loyal citizens of the South. Speakers called for the full measure of freedom both as a just reward and because it was the only protection against the return of white tyranny. But their argument, above all, was spiritual, suggesting that freedom, as clearly revealed in Scripture, was God's will.

The Reverend John M. Brown, of Norfolk, expressed the delegates' conviction that justice required further and continued intervention by federal authority. Many white people in the state, Brown noted, "despise us simply because we are black, and, especially, because we have been made free by the power of the United States government, and … they will not be willing to accord to us, as freemen, that protection which all freemen must contend for, if they would be worthy of freedom." Brown added that "freedom was not of our making, yet we believe it was the intention, and is the will of God." In language taken directly from the Bible, another delegate noted how Black Virginians had "prayed [for] … this day when we can breathe the free air of an American citizen and worship the God of our fathers under our own vine and fig tree." The final declaration of rights issued by the convention called for the "immediate repeal of all laws operating against us as a separate class of people."

The First Vote.

Such speeches were heard, at least by Republican politicians. In the 1866 midterm elections, they gained veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress, authorized the Union Republican Congressional Committee to court freedpeople's vote, and enacted a series of Reconstruction Acts that replaced civilian with military governments in Virginia and every other former Confederate state except Tennessee. Starting in March 1867, Radical Republicans in Congress directed military commanders to enroll adult Black male voters for elections reconstituting state governments throughout the South. Most whites, meanwhile, were disfranchised. Radicals also drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, defining citizenship to include African Americans.

Established Churches and Missionaries

Constitution of the First Baptist Church

Many Black churches had a long history. Petersburg's First Baptist Church, founded in 1774 in Lunenburg County and relocated to Petersburg after a fire in 1820, was one of the oldest and largest Black churches in the United States. First African Baptist Church of Richmond was founded in 1841, but Virginia law required the Black church to retain white leadership; Dr. James H. Holmes became the first Black minister of the congregation in 1867. During and after the Civil War, northern missionaries poured into the South expecting to proselytize African Americans but found instead former enslaved congregations ready to be officially enrolled into their denominations.

African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) missionaries competed for new Black adherents with each other and with northern white missionaries from the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the Methodist Episcopal Church. They all enjoyed some measure of success in mission work. The AME and AMEZ missionaries marketed their denominations as independent and Black. Methodist Episcopal and Baptist missionaries presented their churches as biracial and, conscious of their recent historical connections with abolitionists, committed to racial equality. Regardless of denomination, most missionaries also offered significant resources to impoverished Black congregations, including money to acquire or improve church property, hymnals and Sunday school literature, and high-quality newspapers such as the AME Christian Recorder and the AMEZ Star of Zion.

Fires at Petersburg

Most white Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists resented northern missionaries' influence over the freedpeople in the same way they scorned Republican Carpetbaggers' uniting with free Blacks to take control of state government. As a result, Black churches' political activism with northern connections made members targets for violence. Beaten and murdered missionaries and freedpeople, along with burned churches, testified to the intensity of white Virginians' anger. But the vast majority of white Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists relied on persuasion in their attempts to halt the exodus of Black Christians from their former masters' churches into northern and African denominations, declaring their love of freedpeople and sometimes conceding small measures of autonomy for Blacks who remained. White Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists even helped buy or build church buildings for new Black congregations. But, with the exception of the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church spun off from the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1870, the departure of Blacks from southern white denominations was absolute.

Political Action, Education, and Acquisition

The Party of Freedom and Its Candidates. The Duty of the Colored Voter.

These growing Black churches led the charge for the right of suffrage, organizing the vast majority of voter registration drives and urging the men in their congregations to vote. Church leaders' tactics in the struggle to achieve political freedom included helping to establish partisan organizations called Union Leagues dedicated to mobilizing Black voters. Opposition to Union Leagues led, in part, to the galvanization of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, to terrorize freedpeople throughout the South. The Reverend John Givens, for instance, wrote to the Union Republican Congressional Committee on July 15, 1867, reporting that even though a "colored speaker was killed three weeks ago" in nearby Lunenburg County, he would travel there to register Black voters and "by the help of God … give them a dose of my radical Republican pills and neutralize the corrosive acidity of their negro hate."

Union Leagues developed close relationships with local Black churches and were concrete symbols of Blacks' new freedom. As a result, Union Leagues became infused with traditional church ritual and liturgy, including declarations of faith in the Republican Party. League meetings often replicated the rhythmical form of a Black church service, including the call-and-response form of communication, "ring-shouts," sermons, and hymn-singing.

Henry Highland Garnet

Members of Black churches understood that, like suffrage, education and land acquisition were also vital to securing freedom and racial equality. With literacy levels no higher than 10 percent among the formerly enslaved, educated white people controlled the wealth and power. Freedpeople needed education to obtain good jobs, acquire property, and fully enter American society. The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet vividly presented this argument in 1865, stating that white respect would follow only after Black financial achievement: "The more money you make, the lighter your skin will be. The more land and houses you get, the straighter your hair will be."

Initially, the main source of basic education was the Radical Republican Congress, which created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in 1865 with $5 million in appropriations for schools and books. But churches provided the organizational support for the developing education system. Many Freedmen's Bureau teachers were northerners recruited by the American Missionary Association, while southern Black churches, such as Third Baptist Church in Petersburg, offered their facilities for Sunday school classes where adults and children could learn to read.

Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute

Church and Academic Hall

A photograph of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) shows the school's chapel, with its 150-foot clock tower, and an academic building at right. The institute was founded in 1868 to educate the formerly enslaved; within a decade the education of Native Americans also became part of the school's mission. This image was taken in 1899 or 1900 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a well-known photographer from Washington, D.C. Johnston was commissioned by the school's second principal, Hollis Burke Frissell, to document the institute and its students for the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Hampton Students Working on Telephones

Students repair and construct telephones in a class at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). The institute was founded in 1868 to educate the formerly enslaved; within a decade the education of Native Americans also became part of the school's mission. This image was taken in 1899 or 1900 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a well-known photographer from Washington, D.C. Johnston was commissioned by the school's second principal, Hollis Burke Frissell, to document the institute and its students for the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Students Studying Agricultural Science

Students at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) measure the amount of force being applied by the screws in cheese presses. This exercise was part of the curriculum devoted to agricultural science. The message on the blackboard behind the class reads in part, "In all its effects, learning the meaning of things is better than learning the meaning of words." The institute was founded in 1868 to educate the formerly enslaved; within a decade the education of Native Americans also became part of the school's mission. This image was taken in 1899 or 1900 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a well-known photographer from Washington, D.C. Johnston was commissioned by the school's second principal, Hollis Burke Frissell, to document the institute and its students for the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Indian Wearing Traditional Clothing in American History Class

Louis Firetail of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe wears traditional clothing and stands next to a bald eagle in an American history class at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). The institute was founded in 1868 to educate the formerly enslaved; within a decade the education of Native Americans also became part of the school's mission. This image was taken in 1899 or 1900 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a well-known photographer from Washington, D.C. Johnston was commissioned by the school's second principal, Hollis Burke Frissell, to document the institute and its students for the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Class in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Students at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) mold clay to mimic objects hanging from easels attached to their desks. This exercise was part of a liberal arts and sciences class. The institute was founded in 1868 to educate the formerly enslaved; within a decade the education of Native Americans also became part of the school's mission. This image was taken in 1899 or 1900 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a well-known photographer from Washington, D.C. Johnston was commissioned by the school's second principal, Hollis Burke Frissell, to document the institute and its students for the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Constructing a House

Students at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) work to finish the interior of a house that they built largely by themselves. The institute was founded in 1868 to educate the formerly enslaved; within a decade the education of Native Americans also became part of the school's mission. This carefully composed image was taken in 1899 or 1900 by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a well-known photographer from Washington, D.C. Johnston was commissioned by the school's second principal, Hollis Burke Frissell, to document the institute and its students for the Paris Exposition of 1900.

When Congress accepted Virginia's new constitution in 1870, which restored the state to the Union, a main achievement of the Reconstruction state government was a revised public school system. Churches, however, continued to provide vital support for freedpeople's education. Mary Jane Wilson's experience illustrates this blending of secular and spiritual education in the postwar South. Graduating in 1874 from Hampton Institute, which was founded by the American Missionary Society in 1868, Wilson opened her own school for Black children in her Portsmouth backyard. "I had as many as seventy-five pupils at one time," she wrote, "Many of them became teachers. I had my graduation exercise in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Those were the happiest days."

At a most basic level, these churches were also financial investments if the congregations owned their buildings and land. Institutional property ownership provided a practical source of progress and power for the African American community. The Census of Religious Bodies, published in 1926, reports that by the turn of the twentieth century, Black Virginia Baptists owned $10.5 million in buildings and land, with the AME, AME Zion, and CME churches owning $1.9 million. Although not-for-profit businesses, African American churches created opportunities for institutional power and economic progress after the abolition of slavery.

The New Negro and the End of Reconstruction

Richmond Theological Seminary and its Students

Graduating Class, Richmond Theological Seminary, 1892.

A studio portrait depicts graduating members of Richmond Theological Seminary's class of 1892. The seminary was dedicated to training African American Baptist ministers. This image, taken by a photographic firm in Philadelphia, is included in Charles Henry Corey's A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, With Reminiscences of Thirty Years' Work Among the Colored People of the South (1895).

Citation: A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, With Reminiscences of Thirty Years' Work Among the Colored People of the South. LC2852 .R4 T3 1895 p.84B, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
Richmond Theological Seminary

This illustration of the Richmond Theological Seminary is from Charles Henry Corey's A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, With Reminiscences of Thirty Years' Work Among the Colored People of the South (1895). The seminary specialized in training black Baptist ministers.

Citation: A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, With Reminiscences of Thirty Years' Work Among the Colored People of the South. LC2852 .R4 T3 1895, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.

Even though Black Virginians were sometimes successful in their ongoing pursuit of education, land, and jobs, their gains were limited and generated controversy. By 1900, the first generation of American Blacks that had never known slavery reached adulthood. Called the "New Negro," a Black individual from this generation was more likely to be literate and even college-educated, many having matriculated at institutions funded by northern churches. For instance, Richmond Theological School for Freedmen (later Virginia Union University) was founded in 1865 and managed by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to train Blacks for the clergy. Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was an industrial training school founded in 1868 by the American Missionary Society to teach basic skills and middle-class values that were considered prerequisites for Black advancement.

Letter from Ex-President Davis.

Meanwhile, among whites, nostalgia about the Old South bred resentment of the New Negro. The Virginia historian Philip Alexander Bruce argued in The Plantation Negro as a Freeman (1889) that in contrast to the docile and devoted plantation slave, the New Negro was leading African Americans dangerously out of their natural, subordinate place in society. Bruce advocated deportation as the best way to head off the impending destruction of civilized society. But many whites instead championed what became Jim Crow laws, legalizing rigid segregation, discrimination, and even lynching as a way to control the Black population.

Confident, sometimes to the point of brashness, the New Negro pushed back. Many Blacks saw little future for African Americans while dependent on whites and turned to Pan-Africanism. Virginia's Black Baptists and African Methodists supported African mission work. Indeed, Virginia Baptists took pride in the fact that their state had been the home of Lott Carey who, early in the nineteenth century, had led enterprises of Black immigration to Liberia. Some AME congregations endorsed AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner's promotion of voluntary immigration to Africa. Assertive Baptists challenged the Home Mission Society for favoring white-led Virginia Union over Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg and its black president.

Virginia Theological Seminary and College

Not all organizations agreed, however, and opposing strategies emerged for dealing with intensifying white racism. One was to appropriate segregation and voluntarily separate as much as possible from white society. The 1890s saw a movement to end all cooperative church arrangements with white organizations, for instance. Similarly, a publishing scandal in 1889 had led the majority of Black Virginia Baptists exclusively to patronize the Black-controlled National Baptist Convention's publication department. The rift resulted from the American Baptist Publication Society's renouncing plans to publish articles by three Black ministers in a collection of theological writings by Black and white authors after white Southern Baptists objected. A majority of Black Virginians took a different approach to such conflict, however, declaring total separation from white society to be impractical and instead choosing a strategy of ongoing cooperation. "Now, let us not show too much independency, but talk business," a committee of Black Baptist cooperationists advised Norfolk, representatives of the Union Baptist Association in 1896, highlighting the need for financial assistance. "Remember we are neither Astors nor Rothschilds."

The issue of separation from whites versus cooperation remained a dilemma for African Americans in Virginia and throughout the South into the twentieth century. The first half-century of freedom left African Americans without the legal rights they had dreamed of but with mostly reconstructed families and many valuable community institutions, few more important than African American churches.

TIMELINE

1774

The New Lights community of free and enslaved African Americans establish the First African Baptist Church in Lunenburg County, later becoming the First Baptist Church in Petersburg. It is one of the oldest African American churches in North America.

1776

Free and enslaved African Americans meet as the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg at the Carriage House of Robert F. Coles, on Nassau Street.

1841

First African Baptist Church of Richmond is founded.

1855

Ebenezer Baptist Church is founded in Richmond.

January 1, 1863

Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring free all enslaved people in Confederate-controlled regions and authorizing the enlistment of Black men in the Union army.

March 3, 1865

An act of Congress establishes the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau) within the War Department.

August 2, 1865

The State Convention of the Colored People of Virginia meets in Alexandria and issues a demand for equality as the proper basis for African American freedom.

November 1865

The American Baptist Home Mission Society establishes the Richmond Theological School for Freedmen. It later will be known as the Colver Institute, the Richmond Theological Institute, and Virginia Union University.

December 1865—June 1866

Six individuals establish the Ku Klux Klan in the law office of Thomas M. Jones in Pulaski, Tennessee.

1867

The Reverend James H. Holmes becomes the first black pastor of First African Baptist Church, in Richmond, serving for thirty-two years.

March 1867

Amid mounting pressure from Radical Republicans, the U.S. Congress places Virginia under the military command of General John M. Schofield.

March 2, 1867

The U.S. Congress passes the Reconstruction Act, ushering in the period of Radical Reconstruction in the South. This act, among other provisions, required former Confederate states to grant voting rights to black men—a measure later made inalienable by the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

March 26, 1868

The Richmond Daily Enquirer & Examiner lauds the Ku Klux Klan as "an organization which is thoroughly loyal to the Federal constitution, but which will not permit the people of the South to become the victims of negro rule."

April 1868

The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a coeducational school for African Americans, is founded in Hampton.

July 9, 1868

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified. It grants citizenship to all African Americans and bars former Confederate officials from holding state or federal political office. A two-thirds vote by both houses will override that limitation in the cases of Robert E. Lee (1975) and Jefferson Davis (1978).

July 6, 1869

Voters ratify a new state constitution that establishes free public schools and includes full suffrage for all males twenty-one years or older, including African Americans. Voters reject disfranchising former Confederates.

1870

The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) is founded.

January 26, 1870

An act of Congress ends Reconstruction in Virginia, readmitting Virginia into the United States and restoring civilian rule.

1876

Democrats devoted to white supremacy amend the state constitution to make payment of the poll tax a prerequisite for voting, hoping to disfranchise some black voters.

1880s-1890s

The Baptist Foreign Mission Convention sends missionaries to Africa.

1895

The Baptist Foreign Mission Convention and two other groups merge in Atlanta, Georgia, to form the first enduring national organization of black Baptists, the National Baptist Convention.

1896

The Virginia Baptist State Convention agrees to a financial compact with the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the Baptist General Association of Virginia (white) to fund a seminary in Richmond and liquidate the debt on the Lynchburg school.

1897

With the strong backing of many Virginia black Baptists, the Lott Carey Foreign Mission Convention forms in large part over the issue of cooperation between black and white Baptists.

May 1897

By this date, a merger between Virginia Union University and Wayland Seminary, a Baptist institution in the District of Columbia, has been accepted by both institutions and by the American Baptist Home Mission Society.

May 1899

Tensions flare at the annual meeting of the Virginia Baptist State Convention (VBSC) when some leaders of the VBSC reject the terms of a joint educational compact to fund a seminary for African Americans in Richmond, and agree to support fully the seminary in Lynchburg.

June 20, 1899

Baptist General Association of Virginia (Colored) meets as an independent black Baptist organization, agreeing to abide by the terms of the financial compact with organizations such as the American Baptist Home Mission Society to support Virginia Union University.

July 10, 1902

Virginia's Constitution of 1902 becomes law, disfranchising thousands of poor whites and nearly eliminating the state's African American electorate. It replaces Virginia's 1869 Reconstruction-era constitution, which had a universal male suffrage clause. The new constitution also creates the State Corporation Commission to regulate the railroads.