Today the Colored Shiloh Baptist Association, comprised of individual black congregations in central Virginia, is formed in Richmond. The association is created from a meeting held at Richmond’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Three congregations in Richmond, three in Petersburg and one in Manchester comprise the seven churches represented whose combined membership is nearly 10,000. Some individual…
The victory of the United States over the Confederacy and subsequent emancipation of remaining slaves in the South has brought an end to decades-old Southern laws mandating the supervision of black churches by whites. Freed from such constraints, the African American Ebenezer Baptist Church in Richmond installs Rev. Peter Randolph (1825-1897) as the congregation’s first…
Black Baptists have been well-established in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia since the early nineteenth century. Their vibrant presence is testimony to the acceptance of blacks in Baptist churches, a preponderance of free blacks in the area, and three decades (the 1820s-1850s) as a disembarkation point for African American missionaries traveling to Liberia through the efforts…