Love, the pastor of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, writes this history to argue his Church's claim to be the "first African-American Baptist Church in North America." He gives a detailed report of the rise of the Church under Andrew Bryan before the split of 1832, when a majority of the members followed Andrew C. Marshall to form a new church in Franklin Square in Savannah, retaining the old name. He provides biographies of the pastors and important leaders of the new congregation, including his own administration, and concludes by giving the documents, addresses and sermons surrounding the first centennial celebration, which included the adjudication of the dispute between the two churches.

Excerpt from History of the First African Baptist Church, From Its Organization, January 20th, 1788, to July 1st, 1888: Including the Centennial Celebration, Addresses, Sermons, Etc I have been asked to introduce this work to the public. In Georgia and Alabama, where the author is known both as a. Speaker and writer, nothing from his versatile pen needs intro duction. An hundred years have passed - most of these years were Spent in hardships and sore tribulations to our poor, ignorant, down-trodden race. Our race has acted nobly and done many things that were highly commendable of the race, but no record was kept of them and hence it went without say ing that the race had done something worthy of praise. This is still true. We have many grand men, eloquent and learned. Men, in our pulpits that nothing is known of them except in their immediate communities. This will always be so until we have a well conducted press of our own and bring out our own men, or do as Dr. Love has done - write their history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Love, the pastor of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, writes this history to argue his Church's claim to be the "first African-American Baptist Church in North America." He gives a detailed report of the rise of the Church under Andrew Bryan before the split of 1832, when a majority of the members followed Andrew C. Marshall to form a new church in Franklin Square in Savannah, retaining the old name. He provides biographies of the pastors and important leaders of the new congregation, including his own administration, and concludes by giving the documents, addresses and sermons surrounding the first centennial celebration, which included the adjudication of the dispute between the two churches.

Together, and separately, black and white Baptists created different but intertwined cultures that profoundly shaped the South. Adopting a biracial and bicultural focus, Paul Harvey works to redefine southern religious history, and by extension southern culture, as the product of such interaction--the result of whites and blacks having drawn from and influenced each other even while remaining separate and distinct. Harvey explores the parallels and divergences of black and white religious institutions as manifested through differences in worship styles, sacred music, and political agendas. He examines the relationship of broad social phenomena like progressivism and modernization to the development of southern religion, focusing on the clash between rural southern folk religious expression and models of spirituality drawn from northern Victorian standards. In tracing the growth of Baptist churches from small outposts of radically democratic plain-folk religion in the mid-eighteenth century to conservative and culturally dominant institutions in the twentieth century, Harvey explores one of the most impressive evolutions of American religious and cultural history.

In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.

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The first slaves imported to America did not see themselves as "African" but rather as Temne, Igbo, or Yoruban. In Becoming African in America, James Sidbury reveals how an African identity emerged in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tracing the development of "African" from a degrading term connoting savage people to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade. In this wide-ranging work, Sidbury first examines the work of black writers--such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America--who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of the Middle Passage, allowing people of various ethnic backgrounds to become "African" by virtue of sharing the oppression of slavery. He looks at political activists who worked within the emerging antislavery moment in England and North America in the 1780s and 1790s; he describes the rise of the African church movement in various cities--most notably, the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination--and the efforts of wealthy sea captain Paul Cuffe to initiate a black-controlled emigration movement that would forge ties between Sierra Leone and blacks in North America; and he examines in detail the efforts of blacks to emigrate to Africa, founding Sierra Leone and Liberia. Elegantly written and astutely reasoned, Becoming African in America weaves together intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and political threads into an important contribution to African American history, one that fundamentally revises our picture of the rich and complicated roots of African nationalist thought in the U.S. and the black Atlantic.