Black Church History

Virginia Church Black History

Black history is American History and today I’ve chosen to share Virginia Black Church History since some of the first organized churches were here in Viriginia.

The First Baptist Church, founded in 1774 in Lunenburg County relocated to Petersburg after a fire in 1820, is the first African-American Baptist congregations in the United States, and one of the oldest black churches in the nation. It established one of the first local schools for black children in the nation.

First African Baptist Church of Richmond was founded in 1841. The original congregation included both slaves and free Blacks. The church was located on the site of the First Baptist Church of 1802.

First Baptist Church of Williamsburg  was founded in 1776 by free and enslaved Black people.  The first building was a brush arbor at Green Spring Plantation. The second building was a brick church built in 1856. The current church is located at 727 Scotland Street. 

Virginia law required the Black church to retain white leadership which ended post-civil war. Black churches  often accepted financial help from northern white organizations and became dominant forces for civil rights activism, literacy education, and job training because these were the paths to true freedom for meaningful change and reform.

The historical church my family (many still do) and I attended in Alexandria, Virginia is Woodlawn Methodist Episcopal Church founded in 1866.  The Woodlawn area, formerly part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, was home to African Americans who had been free landowners before the Civil War, people recently emancipated from slavery, and northern Quakers who had arrived in the 1840s.  Woodlawn Methodist church was built on land purchased from Quakers, housed a Freedmen’s Bureau school that became a public school by 1871. The congregation established a cemetery and in 1888 built a new sanctuary. When Fort Belvoir expanded during World War II, the church moved to the historically black community of Gum Springs. The  cemetery remains at Fort Belvoir with many of my family members buried there including my grandparents and great-grandparents.