Jacob Justiss Describes the First Five Exclusively African American SDA Churches.

Angels in Ebony, an informal history of the African American in Adventism, dedicates a page to describe how the first black church, located in Edgefield Junction, Tennessee, came into being. A short notice is provided for each of the next four exclusively black churches to be founded. Justiss states that the pre-war suppression of the black church in the South resulted in a leadership vacuum among the 4,000,000 liberated blacks. After the Civil War, the first efforts to convert Southern blacks were undertaken by laymen such as Silas Osbourne (a white Kentuckian who inaugurated the work in 1871). Silas Osbourne was a layman, but was an effective preacher, and was often addressed as “reverend” by people who were not sticklers about the use of this honorific. The author states that Osbourne was eventually ordained. E.B. Lane came from Adventist headquarters to evangelize people in the Nashville area, also in 1871. His work led to the establishment in 1883 of a company of black Adventists in Edgefield Junction, Tennessee. One of the first members of this congregation, Thomas Allison, had two sons who continued in the faith, Thomas H. Allison (a musician and evangelist to the South and West) and Jonathan W. Allison (also an evangelist). A second black Adventist church was started in Louisville, Kentucky in 1890 by Alonzo Barry, a man who was inspired to do this by reading the Review and Herald.  First Church of Washington, DC was founded a year previously, in 1889, but it was integrated, and not all black. Since Edgefield junction is out of business, this makes A. Barry’s Louisville church the oldest black Adventist church still in operation. It was formerly called Magazine Street Temple Seventh Day Adventist Church, but the use of the term “Temple” has fallen out of fashion, and it is currently named Magazine St. SDA Church. A third black Adventist church was started in 1891 in Bowling Green, Kentucky (famed as home to the assembly plant of the “Bowling Green Bomber,” AKA the Chevrolet Corvette). Fourth in the list was New Orleans in 1892, one connected with C.M. Kinney, who happens to be the first ordained black Adventist minister in history. A fifth church was created 8 miles away from the first (Edgefield Junction) in Nashville, in 1894.