George Freeman Bragg
| George Freeman Bragg | |
|---|---|
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| Born | January 25, 1863 Warrenton, North Carolina, United States |
| Died | March 12, 1940 (aged 77) Baltimore |
| Occupation | Priest |
| Known for | Afro-American activist |
| Spouse(s) | Nellie Hill |
George Freeman Bragg (January 25, 1863 – March 12, 1940) was an African-American priest, journalist, social activist and historian. The twelfth African American ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church of the United States, he worked against racial discrimination and for interracial harmony, both within and outside of his church.
Bragg was born into slavery in Warrenton, North Carolina, in 1863, during the American Civil War, and baptised at Emmanuel Episcopal Church. As the war ended, his carpenter father (also George Freeman Bragg) and seamstress mother (Mary) moved their family to Petersburg, Virginia to live with his grandmother Caroline Wiley Cain Bragg, a devout Episcopalian and former slave of an Episcopal priest. Even before the war, Petersburg had been known for its prosperous free black community, and the city's Episcopal churches soon established Sunday schools for black children, to prepare them for the responsibilities of citizenship.
In 1867, Major Giles Buckner Cooke (a Virginia Military Institute graduate and former Confederate army officer on the staff of General Robert E. Lee who after the war began studying to become an Episcopal priest) had started a Sunday school for freed slaves at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Petersburg. Two other Confederate veterans, Alexander W. Weddell and future bishop Robert Atkinson Gibson had done likewise at Grace Episcopal Church the previous year. The following year Caroline Bragg was among the founding members of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Petersburg's first black Episcopalian church, and her extended family formed much of the congregation. In 1869, with financial support of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Peabody fund, Petersburg became the first city in Virginia to begin establishing public schools for black children, and Cooke became principal of the new Elementary School Number 1 (which later became Peabody High School). He later formed Big Oak Private School for the same purpose. In 1872, when the first priest associated with St. Stephens, the Rev. J.S. Atwell, an African-American missionary from Kentucky who had also been trying to revive St. Philip's African-American congregation in Richmond, resigned and moved to Georgia, Cooke (who had been ordained deacon the previous year) became St. Stephens' second rector. He soon merged his Big Oak school with the others to form a normal school, then added a divinity school to train African American clergy. Young Bragg became one of the first students at Saint Stephen's Normal and Industrial School, which in November 1884 Virginia chartered as the Bishop Payne Divinity and Industrial School (ultimately merged into the Virginia Theological Seminary). Another early student and success story was James Solomon Russell, who founded Saint Paul's Normal and Industrial School, in Lawrenceville, Virginia after in 1869 founding the Methodist-leaning Zion Union Apostolic Church for African Americans with the support of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.
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