Today in Natchez, Mississippi, a Union-occupied city since September 1863, an experiment begins in the city’s Rose Hill Baptist Church, a historic black congregation. The experiment is in the form of a church day school for black children, a school enabled by the support of Northern abolitionists who provide teachers for the new school.
In the Rose Hill Church meeting house in the months to come emancipated black children are provided with lessons in reading, writing and morality. For reasons of practicality, the Bible is the primary lesson book for all courses: most free black families own a copy of the Bible, and for those who don’t, Northern missionaries readily supply copies. The school continues following the war, and in 1870 is incorporated into the city’s first tax-supported public school system.
Rose Hill Baptist Church is well-suited for serving as the initial venue for the education of black children in Mississippi. The state’s oldest black Baptist congregation, Rose Hill began in the early 1830s when black members of the city’s Wall Street Baptist Church so outnumbered white members that in 1834 they began meeting in a separate building and formed their own congregation, albeit with a white overseer present as required by law. The name of the church was a reference to the abundance of roses that grew on the hill where the church was founded under a brush arbor.
In 1861 the white overseers departed and the congregation celebrated full autonomy. After the war Rose Hill Baptist church attained great influence in Natchez.
The church continues to exist in the present, located on Madison Street between Rankin and Martin Luther King, Jr. streets. The present building was constructed in 1908.
Sources: Christopher M. Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875, University of North Carolina Press, 2009, pp. 64-65 (link); N. H. Pius, An Outline of Baptist History, Nashville: Nashville Baptist Publishing Board, 1911, p. 62 (link); “Rose Hill Missionary Baptist Church,” Mississippi historical marker (link); Lee E. Williams, Mt. Helm Baptist Church, 1835-1988, p. vii (link); Samuel S. Hill, Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study, Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983, pp. 186-187 (link); Rose Hill Baptist Church, VisitNachez (link); William R. Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, University of North Carolina Press, 2009, p. 15 (link)
