Cyclists riding along rural roads or through small towns on a Sunday morning will likely notice increased activity in churches along their route. Before services, parking lots will gradually fill with cars and people will gather to enter the building. After the services, people will depart the church and the parking lots will gradually empty. During services, if the weather is good and windows or doors are open, cyclists may hear a bit of the service or even the sounds of a choir, an organ, or simply a piano. Church congregations, just like church buildings, have a history. The people who attend a church may be connected by shared location, family allegiance, or generational connections as much as they are by commitment to a particular denomination, theology, or doctrine. History can also divide communities. These divisions may result from theological disputes, organizational changes, or personal disagreements. In Virginia, and in the United States more generally, divisions in churches may also reflect divisions between the races. Two churches in central Virginia along route 76 illustrate how deeply race has shaped religion in the past as well as the present. Ebenezer Baptist Church and Mount Olivet Baptist Church are located just one mile apart on Coatesville Road. This division between two Baptist churches has its origins more than one hundred and fifty years ago, following the Civil War, and has remained in place ever since. The origins and legacies of this split reveal a great deal about religion in Virginia history and in the present.
Welcome to episode 7 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the location where the route crosses Needstan Creek, located just over 110 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and nearly 44 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your narrator, Tom Ewing, and this episode is based on research by Kaitlynn Harless and Grace Kostrzebski. This podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte, in collaboration with Project Director Tom Ewing.
The origins of the division between Ebenezer Baptist Church and Mount Olivet Baptist Church can be traced back many centuries in history. Europe’s brutal treatment of Africans was always inseparably connected with Christianity. Europeans invented an image of Africa as uncivilized in order to justify campaigns against the states, cultures, and people inhabiting the continent. The enslavement of Africans perpetuated these prejudices, as those capturing, transporting, and owning slaves refused to admit or accept their humanity. These perceptions of backwardness coexisted with equally broad perceptions of Africans as inherently spiritual, but in ways regarded by Europeans as inferior to their Christian faith
Among the enslaved populations, religion emerged as one of the avenues for hope and a sense of community. Initially, some slave owners forced the enslaved to convert to Christianity in the name of saving their souls and with the hope that the Church’s message of accepting hierarchies would promote submission. Other owners discouraged conversion because they did not want the moral dilemma of brutalizing people sharing their same faith. Still others feared that church services among the enslaved could become a forum for organizing resistance or preparing to escape.
As the institution of slavery became more established in the southern United States, it became more common for owners to allow, encourage, or force slaves to convert to Christianity. Slave owners and preachers worked together to create a Biblical narrative that promoted obedience among the enslaved. Slaves often attended the same church as slave owners, thus ensuring they remained under constant observation. Large plantations had their own church buildings, thus depriving slaves of yet another opportunity to travel beyond the boundaries of the owner’s property. Free African Americans looked for opportunities to practice their faith by creating their own churches. In the absence of separate churches, free African Americans were barred from white churches because of their color and from plantation churches for fear that they would inspire rebellion. Black churches faced constant scrutiny for their choices and often had white preachers as leaders of their church.
In spite of this structural racism, which pervaded buildings as well as dogma, enslaved and free African Americans still looked to religion for comfort, hope, and even inspiration that their conditions would eventually improve. African American preachers would share a gospel of obedience when in front of the slave owners and later spread a gospel of liberation when free from white surveillance. For the enslaved who did not convert either because of the slave owner’s bias or their own determination to hold onto their indigenous practices, they often practiced secretly – in covert meetings or individually seeking out quiet places to practice alone. Indigenous African religious practices were preserved and later combined with Christianity due to this independent form of religious practice. Freed African Americans fought back against white preachers who sought to weaponize religion as a means of subjugation by supporting black preachers who encouraged a new perspective on Christianity that favored the poor and downtrodden. African Americans – regardless of whether they were enslaved or freed – challenged white influence in their mostly Black spaces, but this dream of freedom from white oversight would not be fully realized until after Emancipation.
The end of the Civil War brought a new age for Black churches in Virginia and across the US south. Most Black congregation members chose to leave white churches to create their own separate churches. Other congregations began when African Americans were expelled from white churches. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created by the federal government to assist emancipated slaves, provided relief in the form of food, clothing and medical care to help with the immediate needs of a population ravaged by a devastating war. Black churches received some help from the Freedmen’s Bureau with the negotiation of contracts and land deeds.
Black churches became one of the few places African Americans could establish their own community with some autonomy and thus relatively free from white scrutiny. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped some churches get established, but most African American churches across Virginia were created by grassroots movements within the local community. African American congregations pooled their resources to build houses of worship, which emerged as physical evidence that communities which survived slavery were now becoming established as free communities. Well established Black churches in the North sent preachers and other forms of support. Schools were created and maintained by churches to teach community members of all ages to read and write. Black women who were congregation members contributed time and money to fundraising efforts to supply their communities with the resources they needed to sustain themselves.
In Virginia after the emancipation, Black churches became the only place where African Americans could self-govern. Democratic processes enabled congregations to select ministers from within the church to represent their wants and interests. Ministers often became community leaders, along with successful business owners, prominent farmers, teachers, and other professionals, as churches served as centers for religious discussion as well as political mobilization. African American churches became a space set apart from a white society intent to oppress and dehumanize African Americans. The church came to represent true independence for Black communities.
But the struggle for true liberation was not over at the decades after the civil war which became known as the “nadir of American race relations.” White racism found expression in extreme violence aimed at African American communities. The Klu Klux Klan initially attacked politically active African Americans and their allies in the South, but as race relations continued to worsen in the early twentieth century, the KKK expanded to become a nation-wide organization. All African Americans were potential targets of violent lynchings, while the burning of Black schools and churches communicated the same message that African Americans were vulnerable to white supremacy. Violent attacks on Black churches were accompanied by institutional pressure from the white establishment to remove these churches from regional associations. White churches that shared the same denominational affiliatation rejected Black churches on the basis of race, thus perpetuating divisions even within the same community. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was propelled in part by renewed activism by African American churches. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was an alliance between Black ministers and civil rights activists with the goal of furthering the movement by uniting the resources of the Black church around the common goal of equality. These efforts continue, as Black churches remain pillars of African American communities across Virginia.
The fact that two churches co-exist less than a mile apart on Route 76 confirms the persistent effects of centuries of American history. Mount Olivet Baptist Church was built in 1847 and included both white and black congregation members. In 1865, the white members adopted a resolution to expel the newly freed slaves from the congregation. Ebenezer Baptist Church was built by the Black former members of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in 1868. To this day, both churches remain separated. Their congregations act independently. There appears to be nothing that indicates that these two churches were once united besides brief mentions in online and published histories. But, the oddity of two churches being so close to each other on the road remains as a potent reminder of the segregation of the past.
Two men buried in the cemeteries of these two churches provide further evidence of the long impact of racial divisions. John Joseph Shoul was born in 1915, served for four years in the Army Engineers during World War II, and was buried in Mount Olivet Baptist Church Cemetery following his death in 1971 at age 55. George Washington Coleman was born in 1905, served as a sergeant in the US Army during World War II, and was buried in Ebenezer Baptist Church Cemetery following his death in 1999 at age 94. Both men were born into a system of Jim Crow segregation, fought in a US army segregated by race, and lived to see the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Both men were buried in cemeters no longer segregated by law, yet in effect segregated by tradition, custom, and especially location.
The story of these two churches is also the story of the Black church in modern America. The Black church was made for African Americans by African Americans. It served as a system of support at a time when systemic racism deprived most African Americans of institutional resources. For more than two centuries, enslaved Africans were forced to adopt Christianity or practice in secret. They were under constant watch by white slave owners. Even freed African Americans were not free from white surveillance, control, and intimidation. With Emancipation, the black church became a symbol of black independence, self-sufficiency, and autonomy. Although Black churches faced extreme persecution by racists, the churches endured. The Civil Rights Movement drew upon the institutional power or Black churches and the leadership of Black clergy to unite and pool their resources to successfully obtain its larger goal of desegregation and racial equality. But there are scars on the landscape that call for us in the present to remember the injustices of the past. Two Baptist churches standing a mile apart remind us of that.
You have been listening to episode 7 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the location where the route crosses Needstan Creek, located just over 110 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and nearly 440 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your narrator, Tom Ewing, and this episode is based on research by Kaitlynn Harless and Grace Kostrzebski. This podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte, in collaboration with Project Director Tom Ewing. To learn more about this project, please visit our website or follow us on social media.
