egro exhorters were encouraged to exercise a measure of spiritual
oversight in the midst of their brethren and so help the church and
pastor in caring for the flock. The segregated group, in a separate
church edifice, meeting for worship at the same hours as the parent
body, gave rise to the separate church altogether, with a white
ministry. In this way many of the largest and most progressive Negro
Baptist churches of the South had their beginnings amid the
vicissitudes of life peculiar to a land of human bondage. The African
Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia, under the direction of Dr.
Robert Ryland, the white president of Richmond College, is a case in
evidence.

Still another type of Negro Baptist church arose where there was no
parent church of white persons in control of the offspring. There were
churches of this character in Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, the
British West Indies, Canada, and in far-off Africa, before the close
of the eighteenth century. In these churches the members were of the
black race. In Virginia and in Georgia churches of this class as well
as others were admitted to membership in the oldest and best white
Baptist associations, in which they at one time were given
considerable attention.[5] It is worthy of note that Negro Baptist
churches of this type were the first Negro Baptist churches in all the
land and preceded by many years the first Negro churches of other
denominations in America.

These churches, moreover, soon established themselves in spite of
opposition, for they were accepted by the Baptist associations. The
Negro Baptist Church organized at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, in
1773 or 1775, probably had no such connection, nor did that of George
Liele in Savannah, established not long thereafter; but the Negro
Baptist Church of Williamsburg, Virginia, sought membership in the
Dover Association in 1791 and was accepted. This church, according to
John W. Cromwell, who is himself a Methodist, was founded in the year
1776. In 1815 the Gillfield Baptist Church, of Petersburg, Virginia, a
Negro congregation, united with the Portsmouth Association, an
organization of white Baptists. Shortly after doing so this church
invited the association to hold its approaching annual meeting with
the Gillfield Baptist Church. The "invitation was accepted and the
church appointed a committee to rent stables and to buy feed for the
delegates' horses." Richard Kennard, from whose church record