Black Baptists

Abstract

The origins of the black Baptist movement are not traced easily. Enslaved black Baptists worshipped on plantations under the supervision of white preachers as early as the 1750s. However, independent black Baptist congregations did not emerge until just before the War for Independence. One stream that flowed into the origin narrative was located along the Savannah River that provides the border between South Carolina and Georgia. George Liele, an enslaved person, was baptized around 1774 and then licensed by his slave owner’s church to preach to enslaved Africans as well as whites in the area. He preached as far north as Silver Bluff, South Carolina, and all the way down to Savanah, Georgia. First African and First Bryan Baptist Churches in Savannah trace their lineage to Liele and David George and are arguably the oldest independent black Baptist Congregations in the United States. Another tributary is found along the Appomattox River in Virginia. In 1774 when the meeting house of a plantation church burned, those black Baptists moved across the river to Petersburg and established an independent congregation known later as First Baptist Church. The National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., is the largest black religious organization and was founded in 1895 in Atlanta. Since it was the result of a merger among organizations, many black Baptists use 1880, the founding date of the oldest group in the merger, as their own. However, in the antebellum period there were organizations that extended beyond local and state boundaries. In 1840, the American Baptist Missionary Convention was formed in Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City partly as rejoinder to the slow and indecisive response of Northern white Baptists on the slavery question. When a “separatist” contingent gained power favoring National Baptist Convention (NBC) development of a publishing house rather than continuing to support white northern Baptist publications, the movement split in 1897 with the “cooperationists” creating the Lott Carey Foreign Mission Convention. In 1915, a fight over who owned the publishing house led to the establishment of the third body, the National Baptist Convention of America, Unincorporated. Although often overlooked, black Baptists were engaged in the fight for social justice in the period between the Great Migration and the Montgomery bus boycott. The denominational leadership, however, took a more conservative position on civil rights activism which led to the formation in 1961 of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. While the majority of the national organizations were established because of social and political differences, there are smaller groups that are separate because of theological distinctions, most significantly, the National Primitive Baptist Convention.