The Silver Bluff Baptist Church was founded between 1774-1775[1] in Beech Island, South Carolina, by several enslaved African Americans who organized under elder David George.[2]
The historian Albert Raboteau has identified it as the first separate black congregation in the nation, although others contend for that distinction, including the First Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia.[2] After the British captured Savannah in 1778 during the American Revolutionary War, George and his congregation of 30 slaves went to that city, seeking freedom, which the British had promised to slaves who escaped from rebel masters. Those church members who stayed in Savannah after the end of the American Revolutionary War evolved as the First African Baptist Church.[3]
George was highly influential in the early black Baptist movement. Resettling by the British with his family and other Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, he founded a congregation there. George and his family chose to migrate to Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1792, when the British founded this new colony in West Africa. He founded a congregation and Baptist church there as well.
- ^ Gordon, Grant (1992). From Slavery to Freedom: The Life of David George, Pioneer Black Baptist Minister. Hantsport, N.S: Baptist Heritage in Atlantic Canada. p. 27.
- ^ a b Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 139-40.
- ^ First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Africans in America, PBS.