Silver Bluff Baptist Church

The Silver Bluff Baptist Church was founded between 1774-1775[1] in Beech Island, South Carolina, by several enslaved African Americans who organized under elder David George.

[2] The historian Albert Raboteau has identified it as the first separate black congregation in the nation, although others contend for that distinction, including the First Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia.

George and his family chose to migrate to Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1792, when the British founded this new colony in West Africa.

In the Great Awakening, northern Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled around the South, converting whites and enslaved and free blacks.

David George and the 30 enslaved members of Silver Bluff Baptist Church went to Savannah to seek promised freedom behind the British lines.

In 1792 the George family migrated from Nova Scotia to the new colony of Sierra Leone, assisted by British abolitionists.