Silver Bluff Baptist Church

The Silver Bluff Baptist Church was founded in 1750 in Beech Island, South Carolina, by several enslaved African Americans who organized under elder David George.

The historian Albert Raboteau has identified it as the first separate black congregation in the nation, although others contend for that distinction, including the First Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. After the British captured Savannah in 1778 during the American Revolutionary War, George and his congregation of 30 slaves went to that city, seeking freedom, which the British had promised to slaves who escaped from rebel masters. Those church members who stayed in Savannah after the end of the American Revolutionary War evolved as the First African Baptist Church.

George was highly influential in the early black Baptist movement. Resettling by the British with his family and other Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, he founded a congregation there. George and his family chose to migrate to Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1792, when the British founded this new colony in West Africa. He founded a congregation and Baptist church there as well.

In the Great Awakening, northern Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled around the South, converting whites and enslaved and free blacks. The Baptists especially offered roles in congregations and churches to blacks, and some men were licensed as preachers and elders.

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