Important African-American Institutions

 

Virginia Seminary (Now known as Virginia University)

Court Street Baptist Church

Diamond Hill Baptist Church

 

A. Virginia Seminary (Now known as Virginia University)

http://www.vul.edu/history.html

 

B. Court Street Baptist Church

Before Emancipation, Lynchburg’s African-American community worshipped  under the watchful eye of the White establishment. In 1843, for example, the White congregation of First Baptist Church voted to buy or build a meeting house for its Black members to be called the African Baptist Church of Lynchburg and a theater building on Court Street was purchased for one-hundred and seventy-five dollars. A White preacher, Reverend John Mason, installed as the newly formed church’s preacher, was “a moderately good gospel preacher and a good, religious, conscientious man.” 1 His presence fulfilled the slavery-era requirement that a “responsible and respectable” White person be present when the African Baptist’s eighty-two members worshipped. When the Court Street theater burned down in 1858, the congregation moved into Booker’s tobacco-processing factory, supervised by another White preacher, James Claxton. When rebuilt, in 1860, Court Street Baptist Church numbered over seven hundred members.


After Emancipation, “for the first time the members of Court Street were allowed to select their own pastor and for the first time the threads which held them to First Baptist Church were finally broken.” Reverend Sampson White, from Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, became Lynchburg’s first African-American preacher. He therefore became the first African-American preacher in Lynchburg to encounter differences of opinion with his congregation: In his April 18, 1870, diary entry, Freedman Bureau teacher Jacob Yoder noted that Reverend Sampson had been asked to leave because his parishioners “had become dissatisfied with their pastor.”


The story of Court Street Baptist Church’s construction in a wealthy, White, downtown neighborhood is one of Lynchburg’s best stories. From its earliest African Baptist Church days, the upscale Court Street neighborhood was the African-American congregation’s spiritual home. So when a vacant lot on the corner of Court Street and Sixth Avenue came on the market, the congregation arranged to buy the ideally located lot for $2,400, paying an initial payment of $1,000. White homeowners in that neighborhood offered the lot’s owner, Mr. Shelton, more than his asking price, then coerced local banks not to loan the church the remaining balance, due in short order.

 

Reverend Phelin Morris, Court Street’s preacher, alerted his several thousand church members—who had little trust in banks—of the impending crisis. Court Street parishioners “went to their homes and collected their savings from between mattresses, socks, small bags stuck in attics and other places. They answered the appeal of the church officers by bringing so much money that several wash tubs were filled.” The lot purchase secured, Court Street congregation’s craftsmen and laborers then set to work, completing their new, stately, spiritual home in 1880.


For over a century, little has happened in Lynchburg’s African-American community without Court Street’s imprint.

        

C. Diamond Hill Baptist Church

Notes, Links

Virginia Seminary Link: History

 

Court Street Baptist Church Notes

1. Most of the information and quotes are from Dr. Leslie Camm’s “Blacks in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1933 – 1945.”