From Whence They Came: Origins of the Missionary Baptists in Southwest Georgia, 1865-1900

By Warren C. Hope

The spiritual realm has been the resort of countless Blacks during their sojourn in America. Black Missionary Baptists history blossomed in Reconstruction and matured in Jim Crow Southern society. However, research on Black Baptists at the regional and local levels has been largely neglected. In obscurity are pioneers who blazed a trail of faith in God and set in motion what Carter G. Woodson and others have called the Negro Church. What began many years ago as their religious experience lives on today, but the stories of their time have not been told. Because religion has been a significant influence on Black people it is important to reconstruct and preserve local and regional religious history. Knowledge of the past is vital to understanding the present. William Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine And Fig Tree: The African American Church in the South, 1865-1900, asserted that this time frame deserved more scholarly attention. Southwest Georgia is fertile ground for Black religious history. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois The Black Church, has there been a focus on Blacks and religion in the region. This book resurrects from invisibilitys custody Blacks embrace of Christianity in local and regional settings. Its contents explore denomination identity formation and religion as a means of uplift and advancement in the microcosm of Southwest Georgia. Through it all, Black Baptist ministers were pivotal actors in the religious drama. Although myths and stereotypes about Black ministers of the past abound, they, nevertheless, led the way down freedom road. This book tells of Black preachers of the past, their efforts to uplift and advance the race, and reveals the depth of their creativity, that was repeatedly demonstrated in the founding of local churches and associations that are vibrant today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477252734

Warren C. Hope

Warren C. Hope is an ordained Missionary Baptist minister and pastor of the Silver Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Coolidge Georgia. A former middle school teacher and elementary school principal, he is a professor of Educational Leadership in the College of Education at Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida. He has a passion for history, which led him to earn the Ph. D. in History from Florida State University in 2008. From Whence They Came: Origins of the Missionary Baptists in Southwest Georgia, 1865-1900, emerged from his passion for history and need to know more about the Missionary Baptist denomination, Black ministers, and the independent churches that were organized following the Civil War.

Book preview

From Whence

They Came:

Origins of the Missionary

Baptists in Southwest

Georgia, 1865-1900

WARREN C. HOPE

US%26UKLogoB%26Wnew.ai

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

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© 2012 by Warren C. Hope. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/28/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-5274-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-5272-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-5273-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913395

Front Cover Photograph, Courtesy Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, WLK 125

Back Cover Photograph, Courtesy Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, WLK 122

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1

Breaking Bread Together: Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord

The Religious Exodus: A Declaration of Independence

CHAPTER 2

Origins of the Black Baptist Church in Southwest Georgia

Nominally Independent Black Baptists Before The Civil War

The Ochlocknee Missionary Baptist Church

Saint Maryland Missionary Baptist Church, Leary

From White Churches to Independent Black Baptist Congregations

First African Baptist Church, Bainbridge

The Second Colored Baptist Church (Jackson Grove Baptist Church), Albany

Bethesda Baptist Church, Americus

Friendship Baptist Church, Cuthbert

Pleasant Grove Baptist, Shellman

Sardis Baptist Church, Dawson

First Elizabeth Baptist Church, Quitman

First Antioch Baptist Church, Valdosta

Black Baptist Churches Established Through Schism

Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist Church, Americus

Beulahland Baptist Church, Dawson

Mount Ebel Baptist Church, Arlington

The Baptist Church from the Bush Arbor

The Plantation Church

CHAPTER 3

More Than Preachers: Agents of Uplift and Advancement of The Race

Literacy Among Black Baptist Preachers

Ordination and Licensing of Preachers

The Black Baptist Church and Bivocational Ministry

Black Baptist Ministers and Temperance

CHAPTER 4

Perspectives on Life and Contributions

Black Women and the Baptist Church

Black Women and Baptist Associations

CHAPTER 5

Early Black Baptist Associations

Black Baptist Associations in Southwest Georgia

The Annual Association Meeting

Associations’ Charitable Support and Aid

The Order of Business in the Association

Black and White Baptists Reunited

Conflict and Resolution in the Association

Association and Minister Conflict The Case of Reverend R. R. Watson

The Case of Reverend L. H. Brown

The Case of Reverend Martin Brown

The Case of Reverend S. Moore

The Association and Intrachurch Conflict

The Ochlocknee Baptist Church Trouble

Bryan Baptist Church Trouble

The Case of S. E. Alexander and Reverend Wm. Styles

Inter-Association Conflict

CHAPTER 6

The Camilla Missionary Baptist Association

Biographical Sketches: Officers of the Camilla Baptist Association

Reverend Purnell B. Borders, Moderator

Reverend Collins T. James, Treasurer

Reverend George H. Washington, Clerk

The Thomasville Missionary Baptist Association

Biographical Sketches: Officers of the Thomasville Baptist Association

Reverend Jacob Wade, Moderator

Giles Price, Clerk

Reverend Wiley F. Tarver, Clerk

Reverend Charles Anderson, Second Moderator

The Southwestern Baptist Association

Biographical Sketch: Reverend David Hines, Moderator

The Fowl Town Baptist Association

Biographical Sketch: Reverend Willis Pa Willis Warren, Moderator

CHAPTER 7

Uplift and Advancement Through Education

Sunday School: The Church of Tomorrow

The Baptist Association: Agent of Uplift and Advancement

A School Within its Bounds

Success at Americus

The School at Richland

CHAPTER 8

The Missionary Motif

Local Missions and the Domestic Agenda

Southwest Georgia’s Black Baptist Associations and Mission to Africa

Conclusion

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

APPENDIX E

Bibliography

About the Author

END NOTES

Preface

Following the Civil War, Blacks in Southwest Georgia withdrew from the White Baptists churches of their former masters and formed independent congregations. Their departure has been described as an exodus. The Baptist churches established by former slaves in the last half of the 19th century are historically important. These congregations and the people who organized them were the forerunners of today’s Missionary Baptists.

The Missionary Baptists’ history unfolded in Reconstruction and continued to manifest in the Jim Crow society that prevailed in the South. However, research on Black Baptists at the regional and local levels has been largely unexplored. In obscurity are pioneers who blazed a trail of faith in God and set in motion what Carter G. Woodson and others have called the Negro Church. What began many years ago as their religious experience lives on today, but the stories of their time have not been told.

In a manner of speaking, Southwest Georgia’s Black Baptists of the past have not had an appropriate burial because they are unsung heroes. Their contributions to posterity are shadowed by time, inconspicuous, and therefore not fully appreciated. Their generation created many churches and associations that are vibrant today. The narrative that follows reflects the words of a gospel song; let us all go back, back to the old landmark, and tells a story about the early Black Baptists in Southwest Georgia.

Introduction

The Black religious experience in the United States, especially its Protestant dimension, constitutes a creative and revolutionary endeavor of a people. It was creative because of integrated African cultural retentions and a theology that evolved in freedom and democracy; revolutionary because the synthesis became the core of a religious belief system that transformed and constructed a new spiritual cosmos.

Religion has been the mobilizing influence for Blacks in America. Slavery, long the organizing principle for their lives is trumped only by the church and faith in God. The Black church for many years was the North Star of hope drawing them to the inevitable dawn of a brighter day. It was a determined and steadfast faith that ushered Blacks through slavery and consoled them during Jim Crow. For Blacks, religion has been the refuge of solace, the rock of ages in a weary land, and the Old Ship of Zion during the journey called the Black experience. The Black church cradled a people through the difficult times of Reconstruction and gave hope in the time beyond.

Problem

Slavery colors the Black experience in the United States like no other phenomenon and is a nucleus out of which it emerged. New World slavery has obscured Blacks knowledge of self and their relationship with Africa. Lack of knowledge about origins can be perceived as a deprivation. Today, in Southwest Georgia there are Blacks who are identified as Missionary Baptists and they are related to the larger body of Black Baptists in the United States. Literature about the Black Missionary Baptists at the local and regional levels is limited. More research about this denomination exists at the national and state levels. Because religion has been a significant influence on Black people it is important to reconstruct and preserve local and regional religious history. Origins are also important because information about beginnings illuminates who, what, when, where, and how. Knowledge of the past is vital to understanding when, where, and how. Knowledge of the past is vital to understanding events that manifest in, and influence the present.

The lack of knowledge about denominational evolution obscures identity and an understanding of religious inheritance and traditions. Southwest Georgia’s Black Missionary Baptists do not have a written history that relates their roots and development, thus many are unaware of their denominational inception. There are also ministers who are unaware of the denomination’s local and regional starting points and are unable to articulate the doctrines, which constitute what it means to be Missionary Baptist. Thus for such a prolific religious group it is encumbent upon them, it would seem, to be cognizant of from whence they came.

Missionary Baptist history is dispersed among numerous churches in Southwest Georgia. Their history can also be found in the fellowship of churches known as associations, which like the Black independent church was organized after the Civil War. Association minutes provide insight into the world of the early Missionary Baptists in Southwest Georgia.

To know the history of the Missionary Baptists in Southwest Georgia is to (a) understand the driving forces that led to independent Black Baptist churches, (b) be introduced to ministers and laity who were prominent in the establishment of early Baptist churches, and (c) know what it means to be a Missionary Baptist.

For Blacks, a significant portion of their history especially the religious component, remains invisible and needs to be incorporated into the literature. What was the evolutionary process at the foundation of the Missionary Baptists and what has been their historical journey in Southwest Georgia presents itself as phenomena of interest in this book.

Purpose

In the early 1800s, Southwest Georgia experienced an influx of Blacks to support the cotton economy that flourished prior to the Civil War. Blacks, enslaved and free, created Missionary Baptist history, which spans more than 150 years. Although the voices of early Black Baptist pioneers have fallen silent, their legacies of proselytizing the gospel, founding churches and associations is indelibly etched in time. Origins of the Missionary Baptists in Southwest Georgia and the need to preserve their legacies, which are influences on the present-day Missionary Baptists were driving forces for historical inquiry.

Significance

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, 1903, and Carter G. Woodsons History of the Negro Church, 1921, were pioneer works that unveiled the spiritual world of Blacks and argued for distinctiveness and inclusion in American religious history. Since then many scholars including, Ruby F. Johnston, John Blassingame, Albert Raboteau, Eugene Genovese, E. Franklin Frazier, and Joseph R. Washington have expanded the historiography that illuminates this sacred cosmos.

Post Emancipation Proclamation and end of the Civil War were seminal times for Blacks in the South and Southwest Georgia. Individual futures and that of a people stood to be determined through singular and collective efforts. Religion figures prominently in the Black community’s development and maturation. Reconstruction and late 19th century were the formative years of the Black church in the South. Historiographically, this research provides insight into the sacred cosmos that Blacks created in America.

David Wills in The Central Themes of American Religious History: Pluralism, Puritanism, and the Encounter of Black and White concluded that the Black and White encounter is a fundamental issue in American religious history. This book illuminates the historical problem of Black and White religious fellowship that resulted from slavery (power and control). This problem was at the base of the initial encounter, and continues today in Sunday morning 11:00, services, which has been described as the most segregated hour in America.

What is Black religion is a question posed in the historiography. The author asserts that its essence is related to uplift, advancement, and survival, which were integrated into the church. As a beneficiary of previous scholarship that has documented the Black religious experience in its varied dimensions, the development of a Black Christian conscious, social protest movement, institution establishment, and negotiator of political, economic, and social realities, this narrative resurrects from obscurity Blacks embrace of Christianity in Southwest Georgia. In addition, it explores denomination identity formation and religion as a means of uplift and advancement in the microcosm of Southwest Georgia. This research contributes a local and regional perspective to the historiography on Black church establishment in the South.

Often maligned because of a lack of education, Black Baptist ministers played a major role in ushering their people into freedom. Freedom in and of itself was no guarantee that Blacks’ future in the United States would be dramatically better as they had to earn an improved quality of life. With many myths and stereotypes to overcome and a place to claim in a reorganized society, Black preachers pointed the way to the place envisioned in the hearts and minds of their people. This dissertation delineates the role of Black preachers in their efforts to uplift and advance the race and provides insight into their creativity, which was demonstrated repeatedly in the founding of local churches and associations that are still vibrant today.

Like American religious history in general, Black religious history in Southwest Georgia needs to be preserved. Religious history in Southwest Georgia defies rendering in one investigation and this inquiry acts as a catalyst for additional research on the Black Missionary Baptists and other denominations Blacks embraced in Southwest Georgia.

Acknowledgements

Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, is the leading repository of Baptist historical materials for the state. The initial search for primary documents commenced at the Georgia Baptist History Depository in the Jack Tarver Library. Information about Black Baptists was extracted from the collection of association minutes.

Appreciation is extended to the staff at the Georgia Baptist Historical Depository, Jack Tarver Library, Mercer University. It was there that I met Dr. Robert Gardner who took an interest in my research and gave assistance towards its culmination.

I express thanks to the many Missionary Baptist pastors in Southwest Georgia who provided me with oral and written histories that were essential to this inquiry. Ruth Merritt (Deceased) and Ann Willingham of Camilla embraced this research as their own and assisted in securing numerous church histories.

To the Silver Hill Missionary Baptist Church, thank you for your support and acts of kindness toward me during this endeavor. To my wife Cyndee, who seems to have always understood my quest for knowledge and the sacrifice it takes, thank you for your love, patience, and all the acts that supported me while I was on the journey. May God richly bless you all!

CHAPTER 1

Antecedents Of Southwest Georgia’s Missionary Baptists

Blacks in America did not embrace Christianity suddenly; rather their acceptance and conversion was evolutionary. The religious history of America during the colonial years acknowledges that many Blacks, enslaved and free, assumed an observer’s role as the Protestant religious drama unfolded. For more than a century, Blacks in the British American colonies were virtually ignored as worthy of proselytizing by Protestant denominations.¹ As a result, the majority of Blacks were neither evangelized nor did they convert of their own volition to Christianity.

There are several reasons why European colonists refrained from evangelizing Blacks, and they are inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. From a slave master’s perspective, Blacks might be influenced to believe that biblical teachings about freedom included them. Concomitantly was a belief that Blacks might misinterpret conversion and baptism as segues to freedom and equality and such thoughts were not to be encouraged among slaves. Yet more reason for those who sanctioned and practiced slavery to oppose religious instruction for Blacks was the perspective that the gospel’s content could undermine the society based upon chattel slavery.² Frightening too was the scenario that Christianity would raise slaves’ esteem and encourage them to become rebellious.³ At the basic level, Whites feared gatherings of Blacks for any occasion because of a deep-seated fear of retaliation for subjection to the injustice of slavery.

Central to conversion also was the issue of language. For many years Blacks and Whites in the British colonies did not share a common language. As successive generations of Blacks were born, English became the primary language.⁴ Thus the increase in converts can be related to proselytizing and Blacks’ ability to understand English. It was not until the Second Great Awakening, though, around 1800 that Blacks accepted Christianity in significant numbers and gravitated toward a Protestant denomination. There are no easy explanations, which account for Blacks’ change of heart. Transplanted into a new existence, estranged from traditional spiritual and cultural roots, Blacks in America needed to configure a spiritual cosmos that approximated that of their African past.

Slavery was a perpetual state of distress and worship can be conceptualized as respite from its horrors.⁵ Perhaps more than other catalysts in the conversion process were the evangelical Baptist and Methodist stance on slavery. Their antislavery posture resonated with slaves. Baptist and Methodist preachers in the last quarter of the 18th century welcomed Blacks into fellowship as brothers and sisters.⁶ Certainly then, antislavery rhetoric has to be considered an accelerant for Blacks’ conversion to Christianity. These denominations permitted Blacks, free and slave, unabridged participation in worship gatherings. Baptists and Methodists did not resort to repressive prohibition for emotional displays, which were construed as a means of communing with God. Blacks surge to these denominations can also be attributed to the religious war for souls between Baptists and Methodists that was waged across the South.⁷ As slave owners were converted by Baptist and Methodist evangelists, their slaves were also influenced in camp meetings, revivals, and church worship services. Blacks were further drawn to the Baptists because of their autonomy. No hierarchies or ecclesiastical structures dictated, and there were no particular clerical education requirements, which would have effectively negated Blacks from preaching.⁸

Eventually, Baptist and Methodist antislavery expositions and prima facia renderings of brotherhood diminished when confronted with racial animosity and intractable beliefs about Blacks and slavery. White clergymen found it expedient to acquiesce to their parishioners’ inclinations rather than commit to the ideals of brotherhood and freedom for slaves. The denominations’ welcoming arms withered under the intense pressure of racist ideology and negative perceptions of Blacks. Christianity enabled the development of a relationship other than slave and master and fostered progress in the cultural encounter between Blacks and Whites. Alas, that progress was undermined because of the inability of Baptists and Methodists to escape the influence of slavery as a social principle.⁹

Some slaves received the gospel by attending slave masters’ churches or through arrangements made by a plantation owner. White ministers preached to slaves