East to West - visiting various Georgia communities from Augusta to Columbus - Special Supplement: Georgia's African American Heritage

American Visions, August-Sept, 1994 by Henry Chase

From pre-Revolutionary days through the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, African Americans have left an imprint on Georgia - an imprint that today can be seen from its eastern to its western borders, from Augusta to Columbus.

The Great Awakening, the midth-century 18th-century revivalist ferment that left "burnt-out districts" from New England to the Deep South, opened the gate to bringing African Americans into Christian churches. Baptists and Methodists, in particular, licensed black men to preach, with the result that by the 1770s some African-American preachers were leading their own congregations.

By 1773, the biracial Silver Bluff Baptist Church, located just across the Savannah River from Augusta, had passed into black hands and was pastored by David George, one of the century's great divines. George led a life of adventure and purpose. Fleeing from slavery in Virginia, he lived in the wilds of South Carolina until sold back into slavery not far from Augusta by the Natchez Indian chief King Jack.

Awakened to the Baptist faith by a slave, and to literacy by his master's children, George preached at Silver Bluff until the chaos of the American Revolution offered him freedom and took him from Augusta, to Savannah, to Canada and then to Sierra Leone, where he planted the Baptist faith and died.

The onset of the Revolutionary War also dispersed the Silver Bluff congregation, most of whom fled either to Augusta or Savannah. In the former city in the 1780s, the Springfield Baptist Church was organized from remants of the Silver Bluff flock, becoming one of black America's founding churches.

Almost eight decades later, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the church's basement served as the first classroom of the Augusta Institute, a freedmen's school. In time, the school moved to Atlanta; came under the direction of its first black president, the renowned educator John Hope; and took the name Morehouse College. Today, the college that began in Springfield's basement is best known as the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr.

Visitors to the rear of the present church building view its predecessor, a wooden, New England-meeting-house-style structure raised in 1801. One of the few examples of this style in the South, it is congregation-centered, in revolt against the typical altar-centered liturgical style of most churches.

Far to the west, on Georgia's border with Alabama, stands a monument to black secular achievement. Gertrude Pridgett "Ma" Rainey put her stamp on the blues - and the blues' stamp on America - long before Bessie Smith hit the scene.

Rainey was born in Columbus to parents who were tent-show minstrels, and the professional career of the "Mother of the Blues' opened here at age 14, when she appeared in a production of The Bunch of Black Blues."

Not long after, she hooked up with Will Rainey, who led the Rabbit Foot Minstrels troupe. Married in 1904, the pair billed themselves as "Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues."

Ma Rainey's powerful evocation of black life in secular and spiritual song won her a national following as a gospel and blues performer long before her 1920 recordings preserved her sound.

Rainey retired in 1934 to her hometown, which had seen little of her in the last quarter of a century and which listed her in the 1937 Columbus City Directory as "Rainey, Gertrude, colored, 805 5th Avenue." in Columbus, she became active in the Friendship Baptist Church, in whose choir she sang. Rainey died in 1939 and is buried in Columbus' Porterdale Cemetery. The death certificate of the Mother of the Blues listed her occupation as "housekeeping."

Today's visitors to Columbus will find the Ma Rainey House the retirement residence of the woman who first transported the blues from its Southern setting. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the house at present can only be viewed from the outside, though there are plans to turn it into a museum.

POINERS

Prominent African-American heritage sites in Columbus include the childhood home of Alma Thomas, America's foremost black female painter; a historical marker commemorating Eugene Bullard an African-American pilot in World War I who flew for the French since he was racially barred from the U.S. Army Air Corps; and the St. James A.M.E. Church, whose wooden doors were hand-carved by slaves.

For further ideas and details about Columbus sites, call the Columbus Convention & Visitors Bureau [(706) 322-1613]. Be sure to ask for the brochure "Columbus, Georgia: Black Heritage."

For further ideas and details about Augusta sites, call the Augusta Convention & Visitors Bureau [(706) 823-6600].