First Colored Baptist Church

About this property

The First Colored Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, also known as First Baptist Church—Lauderdale, was built in 1939 in a vernacular Colonial Revival style, with design attributed to Rev. Thomas O. Fuller. The First Baptist Church, Lauderdale is a rectangular brick building with brick laid in common bond. It has a limestone fence separating its parking area from the street, which is a c.1890 fence from the former Second Empire-styled Sanford house on the property. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. It was deemed significant for its association with Thomas Oscar Fuller (1867-). First Baptist Church, Lauderdale, in Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee is one of the city's most significant African American churches and is associated with the early twentieth century African-American religious, education, and political leader, the Reverend Thomas Oscar Fuller. Although the present church building was not constructed until 1939, the significance of the congregation to African-American religious and social history in Memphis dates prior to the American Civil War. The formation of African-American churches during and after the Civil War represented a new era in institution building for the newly emancipated blacks. Religion, which provided a source of strength for African Americans during their enslavement, proved a logical arena for most of the urban African-American institutional development after the war. The fact that a majority of organizational accounts kept with the Freedmen's Saving and Trust Company immediately after the war were either African American churches or benevolent societies associated with the churches, is just one demonstration of the significance of the newly established black religious institutions in post Civil War Memphis. The congregation of the First Baptist Church, Lauderdale, is considered the “Mother Church” for most of the black Baptist congregations in Memphis, and by extension, for most of the African- American Baptist churches in West Tennessee. The earliest beginnings of the First Baptist Church trace back to 1854, when Morris Henderson, then a slave, ministered to a small group of Christians. Supervised by white ministers, this first group of believers worshiped in the basement of the white First Baptist Church on the corner of Beale and Main Street. A decade later, circa 1864–1865, Morris Henderson received his formal ordination from Baptist missionaries who had flooded into many southern cities to minister to the needs of newly emancipated African Americans. The end of the Civil War in the spring of 1865 prompted Reverend Henderson to make a down payment on a lot located on Beale Street, using funds raised by women members of the newly established congregation. Hundreds of dollars, for example, came from the efforts of the women's Baptist Sewing Society. Reverend Henderson led his congregation from the basement of the white church at Main and Beale streets to worship under a “brush arbor” at the new site, which was approximately four blocks west on Beale Street. Henderson and leading members chartered the new church as the First Colored Baptist Church. This action made Henderson one of the first African Americans in Memphis to reject white religious paternalism and successfully pioneer a completely black institution. It also established a tradition of leadership and activism on the part of the ministers of the congregation. The role of women members in funding the new church also established a tradition of service for various women clubs and societies within the congregation.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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