Читать книгу The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama: Their Leaders and Their Work - Charles Octavius Boothe - Страница 7

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In turning to the subject under consideration it seems fitting that we should first review those facts and events which gave us our denominational existence. Such a course, it seems to the writer, will serve to give us a proper “setting.” It is not definitely known just when, where and by whom, Baptist principles were first propagated upon the American continent; it is, however, an historic fact that these principles assumed organic form in Providence, R. I., in 1639, in the constitution of a Baptist church under Roger Williams as pastor. Other churches soon followed, out of the union of which there early rose Associations, Conventions and Missionary Societies.

In 1620, nineteen years before the organization of the church in Providence, the African was brought into Virginia as a slave. The North and the South joined heartily in the work of binding their black brother with the chains of cruel bondage. Thus the naked savage was taken from his freedom and from his gods and chained to the chariot wheels of Christian (?) civilization to be coerced, dragged into new observations, new experiences, and a new life.