African American churches in Virginia Beach have deep roots, tracing back to the period following the Civil War. These churches served not only as places of worship but also as vital community centers, providing spiritual guidance, educational opportunities, and platforms for advocating civil rights. This article delves into the rich history of these institutions, highlighting their origins, their role in the Reconstruction era, and their enduring legacy in the region.
Early Beginnings and the Post-Civil War Era
In the years before and during the Civil War, enslaved people used religion as a means of preparing for freedom. Often allowed to attend segregated sections of white Protestant churches, they heard from white ministers the New Testament’s promise of salvation. It was a lesson intended to pacify them with an “otherworldly” salvation rather than instill hope in earthly freedom. Enslaved preachers had a different vision, however. Speaking in darkened plantation quarters, more openly in religious meeting places known as “praise houses” (usually hidden away in secluded rural areas), and even in formal settings such as Petersburg’s First Baptist Church and Richmond’s First African Baptist Church, they taught Black people how to use genuine professions of faith in Christian salvation to camouflage simultaneous expressions of belief in imminent political freedom.
Alienated from nearly all other institutions while enslaved, newly freed African Americans formed Christian churches or joined long-established ones. Making full use of educated clergymen, they found churches to be ideal locations to advance civil rights and create alliances with like-minded secular groups. As many as 80 percent of African Americans belonged to a church in postwar Virginia, most of them identifying as Baptist.
These Christian churches became sites of protest against racist Virginia policies, including white reluctance to extend the franchise to Blacks after the state rejoined the Union. For example, several Christian ministers organized the Convention of the Colored People of Virginia in Alexandria in August 1865, drawing delegates from twenty-two mostly urban districts throughout the state. In speech after speech, leaders demanded equal rights with white citizens, including the right of suffrage.
The Reverend John M. Brown, of Norfolk, expressed the delegates’ conviction that justice required further and continued intervention by federal authority. Many white people in the state, Brown noted, “despise us simply because we are black, and, especially, because we have been made free by the power of the United States government, and … they will not be willing to accord to us, as freemen, that protection which all freemen must contend for, if they would be worthy of freedom.” Brown added that “freedom was not of our making, yet we believe it was the intention, and is the will of God.”
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Established Churches and Missionaries
Many Black churches had a long history. Petersburg’s First Baptist Church, founded in 1774 in Lunenburg County and relocated to Petersburg after a fire in 1820, was one of the oldest and largest Black churches in the United States. First African Baptist Church of Richmond was founded in 1841, but Virginia law required the Black church to retain white leadership; Dr. James H. Holmes became the first Black minister of the congregation in 1867. During and after the Civil War, northern missionaries poured into the South expecting to proselytize African Americans but found instead former enslaved congregations ready to be officially enrolled into their denominations.
African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) missionaries competed for new Black adherents with each other and with northern white missionaries from the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the Methodist Episcopal Church. The AME and AMEZ missionaries marketed their denominations as independent and Black. Methodist Episcopal and Baptist missionaries presented their churches as biracial and, conscious of their recent historical connections with abolitionists, committed to racial equality.
Most white Southern Methodists and Southern Baptists resented northern missionaries’ influence over the freedpeople in the same way they scorned Republican Carpetbaggers’ uniting with free Blacks to take control of state government. As a result, Black churches’ political activism with northern connections made members targets for violence.
White Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists even helped buy or build church buildings for new Black congregations. But, with the exception of the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church spun off from the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1870, the departure of Blacks from southern white denominations was absolute.
Political Action, Education, and Land Acquisition
These growing Black churches led the charge for the right of suffrage, organizing the vast majority of voter registration drives and urging the men in their congregations to vote. Church leaders’ tactics in the struggle to achieve political freedom included helping to establish partisan organizations called Union Leagues dedicated to mobilizing Black voters.
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Opposition to Union Leagues led, in part, to the galvanization of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, to terrorize freedpeople throughout the South.
Members of Black churches understood that, like suffrage, education and land acquisition were also vital to securing freedom and racial equality. Freedpeople needed education to obtain good jobs, acquire property, and fully enter American society.
Initially, the main source of basic education was the Radical Republican Congress, which created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in 1865 with $5 million in appropriations for schools and books. But churches provided the organizational support for the developing education system. Many Freedmen’s Bureau teachers were northerners recruited by the American Missionary Association, while southern Black churches, such as Third Baptist Church in Petersburg, offered their facilities for Sunday school classes where adults and children could learn to read.
Churches, however, continued to provide vital support for freedpeople’s education. Mary Jane Wilson’s experience illustrates this blending of secular and spiritual education in the postwar South. Graduating in 1874 from Hampton Institute, which was founded by the American Missionary Society in 1868, Wilson opened her own school for Black children in her Portsmouth backyard.
At a most basic level, these churches were also financial investments if the congregations owned their buildings and land. Institutional property ownership provided a practical source of progress and power for the African American community.
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Examples of Historic Churches in Virginia Beach
Several churches in Virginia Beach stand as testaments to this rich history:
- Morning Star Baptist Church: Founded in 1892 by members of Ebenezer Baptist Church, it is one of the oldest African-American churches in Virginia Beach.
- Ebenezer Baptist Church: This church began as a small log cabin in 1859 and quickly adapted to the needs of a growing congregation.
- Asbury Christian Fellowship Church: Located in the Pungo community and founded by African Americans in 1871, it was originally known as Asbury United Methodist Church.
- Union Baptist Church: Established in 1862, this church provided a safe haven for Christians evading the dangers of slavery.
The New Negro and the End of Reconstruction
By 1900, the first generation of American Blacks that had never known slavery reached adulthood. Called the “New Negro,” a Black individual from this generation was more likely to be literate and even college-educated, many having matriculated at institutions funded by northern churches.
Meanwhile, among whites, nostalgia about the Old South bred resentment of the New Negro. The Virginia historian Philip Alexander Bruce argued in The Plantation Negro as a Freeman (1889) that in contrast to the docile and devoted plantation slave, the New Negro was leading African Americans dangerously out of their natural, subordinate place in society.
Confident, sometimes to the point of brashness, the New Negro pushed back. Many Blacks saw little future for African Americans while dependent on whites and turned to Pan-Africanism.
Not all organizations agreed, however, and opposing strategies emerged for dealing with intensifying white racism. One was to appropriate segregation and voluntarily separate as much as possible from white society. The 1890s saw a movement to end all cooperative church arrangements with white organizations, for instance.
The rift resulted from the American Baptist Publicatio...
Today, Virginia Beach, the state’s largest city, is a patchwork of seven voting districts and a number of neighborhoods, home to a variety of economically and socially diverse residents. Before that merger the county was home to communities inhabited mostly by African-Americans.
In the coming months Virginia Beach Historian, Edna Hendrix, who has written two books about the city’s African-American historical legacy, is using a small grant from the city to collect and write about the history of 25, or more of these historic Black communities that she has identified which once existed in old Princess Anne County.
Another effort, to be undertaken by Cheryl A. Snowden, another Black historian at the Beach, is using a city grant also to research specifically, the history of the oldest Black community in that city, which dates back to the War of 1812. Eventually their labor of love will be written as research papers for public and scholarly consumption by city officials and patrons of the city’s public library.
Right now the two are traveling about the city of Virginia Beach and other research centers in Richmond, Washington D.C. and Petersburg, Virginia searching for documents and other resources to write their papers and unearth information about these historic Black communities.
Hendrix said that among the communities long gone, she is seeking information about two which were named “Colored Ghent.” She says if anyone knows of its history, please contact her.
But one of the most important resources the two historians hope will step forward are people who once lived or worked in the communities when they were mostly Black enclaves.
Hendrix said that while some are still mostly Black sections of the city, such as Seatack or Burton Station, many of the names of these once all Black communities are not associated with that history now.
Many of the areas have been transformed by residential and industrial redevelopment. Kempsville, Oceana, Stumpy Lake, Creed, Pungo, Centerville, Black Water. Reedstown, Newsome Farms and others are among the communities Hendrix mentioned.
One facet these communities had in common were churches, lodge halls or other buildings which served as community gathering places. While most of the schools are gone, about 15 of the old churches still stand in Virginia Beach, such as the Morning Star Baptist Church in Beachwood and Ebenezer Baptist Church near Burton Station.
During the days of racial segregation, regardless of the distance from the facility, Blacks children from all of the communities were assigned to the Princess Anne County Training School, which was located in the Kempsville section of the county.
Princess Anne County Training School later expanded in size and the facility was renamed Union Kempsville High School in 1962. In 1969, the high school closed after city-wide integration of schools started in Virginia Beach.
Zion Church traces its roots to right after the Civil War, built and worshiped in by freed Black families. The church was the center of the community.
Dr. Hutchinson knew she had to rebuild. Since the church's insurance policy did not cover much of the damage, she started raising money. Church members paid for new stained glass windows, etched with the names of parishioners past. Others helped fund everything from the steeple to the seats, all feeling a responsibility to their roots.
"I think the older members have put that weight on their children," she added. That's why you teach the history."
Dr. Hutchinson says they're praying for donations to help with that. All rights reserved.
The Role of the African American Church in the Civil Rights Movement
Historic Landmarks and Sites
From neighborhoods and parks to churches and schools, these 13 sites reflect the dynamism of African American heritage at pivotal points in history. Sites marked with an asterisk are privately owned; however, visitors may drive by.
First State Landing Park, previously known as Seashore State Park, was built by an all-African American regiment, Company 1371. Formed in response to the Civilian Conservation Corps which sought to reduce unemployment after the Great Depression, Company 1371 constructed roads and trails, built cabins, planted trees and more.
Oceana Lodge No. One of the region’s oldest Masonic lodge halls, Oceana Lodge No.
The first Pleasant Ridge School, which is next door to Asbury Christian Fellowship Church, opened around 1886 for Black children in first through seventh grades. The one-room schoolhouse was destroyed by a fire around 1918 and rebuilt sometime later.
After several denied requests by Princess Anne County to build a high school, African Americans raised enough money to buy land. In 1938, these funds, along with grants, persuaded the county to build Princess Anne County Training School-the area’s first and only high school for African Americans.
Newsome Farm was formed Oct. 20, 1869, by five former slaves: Lemuel Stone, Jeremiah Hines, Eli Cornelius, Berry Cornick and Abraham Woodhouse. The property eventually evolved into a settlement of 70 homes.
Developed for middle-class African Americans in 1954 by Black businessman and college graduate Walter H. “Crow” Riddick, the well-maintained L & J Gardens neighborhood was a symbol of the American Dream during racial segregation.
Against the backdrop of segregation, Seatack residents achieved great feats including building churches, schools, parks, a community day care and a recreation center. The community is credited with founding one of the first Black-owned fire stations in eastern Virginia.
| Church Name | Year Founded | Historical Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Morning Star Baptist Church | 1892 | One of the oldest African-American churches in Virginia Beach. |
| Ebenezer Baptist Church | 1859 | Adapted to the needs of a growing congregation from a small log cabin. |
| Asbury Christian Fellowship Church | 1871 | Originally known as Asbury United Methodist Church, located in Pungo community. |
| Union Baptist Church | 1862 | Provided a safe haven for Christians evading slavery. |
