[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on History of the Black Southern Baptist Church
African American Baptists in Nashville began their religious involvement within a rich local history. Fort Nashborough was settled on December 24, 1779, when some 200 men and boys drove cattle, horses, and sheep across the frozen Cumberland. Another group of settlers came via Kentucky, and a fleet of boats arrived down the Cumberland River, with women, children, men, slaves, and free Negroes aboard by April 1780. These European American and African American people came from the Watauga Settlement (then western North Carolina, now East Tennessee). Among the Negro settles were Moses Renfroe, Adam Boyd, Dave Boyd, Fib Boyd, Febbie Boyd, Cumbo Williams, George Boyd, Milla Jennings, and Pasty Donelson-all slaves.
Robert, the servant of James Donelson, had been the first Negro to arrive with the first exploration party in the early months of 1779, when they planed a crop of corn in anticipation of the arrival of the other settlers. Robert (Donelson) lost his life in the India attack of 1781. BY 1787, Negroes comprised 22 percent of the 477 settlers and Fort Nashborough, and by 1820 some 7,088 of Davidson County's 20,154 inhabitants were Negroes. (Brown, Raymond, 1986)There were few church congregations in the town until the 1820's. Negroes and whites attended the same church services, and most slaves masters attended no church at all and did not allow their slaves to gather for religious services. However, the town's Negroes have a clandestine church, an invisible congregation, which met in Buck's Alley, under Negro preacher Dick Ham.
The Reverend John Moore, a former Nashville slave, said: "the slaves would skip out at night to a private meeting and turn a pot bottom up on the ground and leave a little hole under it so the sound of their voices would go under the pot and nobody [the whites] would hear what they were talking about........
