Beginning at 10:00 AM on January 25, 1888 and continuing through the next day, at least 350 black Georgian men met at the Cotton Avenue Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia to determine the wise course of future action, for the promotion of the race's welfare. The men divided themselves into committees on issues ranging from education to temperance. On the final evening each committee presented their resolutions...
In January of 1874, the United States Congress introduced a bill concerning civil rights in the South. A congressman named Henry Harris opposed the bill, explaining that Congress did not have a right to interfere with the internal legislation of the states. He asked if anyone would agree that black people were equal to white men. A colored member of Congress named John Roy Lynch from Mississippi got...
Old Midway Church in Liberty County, Georgia served as a place where both whites and blacks came together to worship in antebellum society. A Congregational polity, its members opposed secession, but the rising tensions brought on by the Civil War resulted in the termination of communication between the Church and its fellow congregations in the North. During Reconstruction, a white Congregational...
Be on the look out for a runaway slave. Wednesday morning, November 21, 1855 found Patrick finnegan, a slave owner, in a dismal mood. His slave, Edmund, became one of the many attempted runaways across the country. If only he could make it across the border line, Edmund would find himself a safe haven to live out the rest of his life. Edmund was described as a 5 feet high, stout built and 26 years...
Sunday morning, January 27, 1829... a joyful thankfulness filled our hearts, for we were entering the land of promise. Mary Wightman Helm had good reason to rejoice after a most difficult journey to Texas. Helm related that the trip usually took a bearable seven days, but left without a breeze in the unpredictable Gulf of Mexico, her voyage took an astonishing 31 days. The ship only carried provisions...
In one edition of the Page Valley Courier Newspaper a reader asserts that The African Baptist Church is larger than any other Baptist church other than on in England. The same gentleman informed the newspaper that he recently attended there sitting by the right side of Chief Justice Chase and ex-Governor Wise, when two hundred persons were baptized. Their evening prayer meeting is attended by over...
On July 9, 1819, a Negro man violently attacked and brutally wounded the wife of his master, a Mr. John M. Smith of Alexandria, Louisiana, with the intention to kill her. On the same day as the attack, the slave, whose name was not given, was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. By the next day he was dead. The relationship between slave and owner teetered on a precarious balance. On one hand slaveholders...
It was the morning of December 16, 1864 and the rumors were rampant. Sherman was in Savannah. And it was true. But it was not until the sixteenth of December that many of the residents of Liberty County, Georgia realized this first hand. Sent out on a foraging party, twelve to fifteen Union troops from General Kilpatrick's camp stumbled upon the plantation of Cornelia Jones Pond and her family as they...
On a large plantation called New Providence in Mississippi, a family constructed a birth record of sorts for their slaves. The records list the name of the child and the month, day and year in which he or she was born beginning in 1839 and finally ending in 1870. There is not the expected steep decline of births towards the end of the list. The Civil War supposedly emancipated the slaves in 1865, and...
Even the romantic lives of slaves fell under the authority of white masters. Slaves, being the property of their masters, couldn't just freely marry at their heart's desire. There was a standard protocol. In his biographical narrative, Allen Parker recounted how the process would likely unfold on a plantation in Chowan County, North Carolina. If a male slave wanted to marry a woman from another plantation,...