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…
In the post-war months Confederate loyalists of Virginia have typically refused to recognize the legitimacy of the freedoms bestowed upon black citizens through the Emancipation Proclamation. Rather, the state’s elites have systematically gone about the business of ensuring that blacks remain in servitude to whites. A campaign of intimidation and violence in Richmond, including the…
Tens of thousands of former slaves were fighting for the United States against the Confederacy by the end of the war. One was Paul Sandridge. Born into slavery near Lynchburg, Virginia in 1841, Sandridge was liberated from bondage upon the death of his owner in 1853. As a free man he settled near Portsmouth, Ohio,…