Edmond Kelley is Tennessee’s first ordained African American Baptist minister. Born a slave in Tennessee in 1817, he escaped to Massachusetts, where in 1851 he published his life’s story to date. Having secretly taught himself to read during his youth, in 1843 Kelley was ordained by the white First Baptist Church of Nashville. Three years…
Sam Richards, an Atlanta businessman and Southern Baptist who fled the city for New York following Sherman’s capture of the city, today arrives back in Atlanta. Like many other middle class white Southerners (of whom there are relatively few, actually) who did not serve during the war, whether having temporarily lived in the North or…
In Selma, the county seat of Dallas County, Alabama, freedpersons feel anything but free. Major J. B. Houston is is the provost marshal for Selman’s Freedmen’s Burea. This month he files a report concerning a dozen cases of “white-on-black violence,” the incidents of which are “but a small part of those that have actually been”…