I have been commissioned to write the biography of Professor W. J. Fluker who spent 40 years on the history faculty at Tuskegee University. If you took one of Fluker’s history classes and are willing to share your experience and how Fluker impacted your life and career, please inbox/contact me, preferably on LinkedIn.
Also, kindly share this post with your local alumni association so we can get maximum support. BATAC Tuskegee Alumni , Houston Tuskegee Alumni Association, Tuskegee Univ. Athletic Hall of Fame, THE GREATER CINCINNATI CHAPTER OF TUSKEGEE AIRMEN, @tuskegee
Hi Michael
When I saw this notice, I immediately thought of a book I once read... and reviewed... I was working with Branden Books at that time, so format was much more formal then, LOL But I did want to refer you to this book for possible background reference...
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Chapter 1
Our Souls Cried Out for Freedom
The history of Bethel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church dates from 1863, 160 years ago, as of this writing. According to the 1860 Census, Macon had a population of 8,247; of that number, 2,851 were Black enslaved people. When the Civil War started, the business leaders of Macon were quick to pick up the cause of the confederacy to protect the legalization of slavery. The economy of Macon and Middle Georgia depended on cotton and enslaved people who planted, cropped, and picked it.
Two years after the shooting started, President Lincoln issued his proclamation of emancipation on
September 22, 1862, to becomeeffective January 1, 1863.
Lincoln’s proclamation commenced during the third year of a bloody civil war between northern and southern states. The Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in states liberated by Union military forces under the federal government’s command. It did not free enslaved people in free states who were not in rebellion against the federal government.
The Emancipation Proclamation was important to enslaved people in Macon and Bibb County, Georgia. As the fall of 1862 gave way to winter, enslaved people in Middle Georgia greeted the coming New Year with great anticipation and fear.
For blacks working and living on the Dunlap and other plantations in Macon, Georgia, in 1863, Lincoln’s “Hail Mary” pass to save the Union did not bring immediate freedom. Freedom would only come when Union troops arrived to liberate the enslaved children of God from bondage in America.
At the time of founding the Watch Night service, which would be the beginning of Bethel Methodist Church, the Confederate States of America controlled the State of Georgia. Georgia had dissolved its contract with the United States of America on January 19, 1861, thereby retaking possession of all the rights of sovereignty it had relinquished when it joined the Union as one of the original thirteen colonies. Georgia was the fifth state of thirteen to secede from the union, following South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama.
Freedom seemed so far away on January 1, 1863, when a band of farsighted Christians, some following the Methodist doctrine and others adhering to the Baptist order, seeking a place of worship, gathered under the leadership of Rev. John Zorn, an ordained Methodist preacher, in a two-room house.
They prayed and sang all night until the sun broke, announcing a new day and a new year. It did not seem like anything had changed. At least they were alive, and their freedom was no more restricted than before Lincoln uttered his proclamation.
Freedom did not come until December 1864 when the Macon city fathers released Union General George Stoneman to General William T. Sherman.
Stoneman had been captured outside of Gray, Georgia, on July 31, 1864, by a militia of Macon residents, near the house where the black Methodists and Baptists worshiped; General Stoneman received his freedom in exchange for a Confederate prisoner of war and General Sherman’s agreement not to torch Macon as he had done to Atlanta and would eventually do to Savannah.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation brought this group together at midnight in 1863, even as they feared retribution from plantation owners as freedom
dawned on New Year 1863. The worshippers had a reasonable suspicion that Middle Georgia planters did not want to lose them to freedom. Shortly after the war, the number of Blacks in Macon rapidly increased from 2,851 to 5,946 by January 1867, and Whites were alarmed that soon there would be more Blacks in the city than Whites.
Business leaders pushed the federal government to remove Black troops from Macon, and in 1868, General Grant permitted Black troops stationed in Macon to be reassigned. Instead, the Black regiment was disbanded.
Almost from the beginning of Negro freedom, Blacks in Macon were ignored by Whites. Few Whites welcomed Blacks into the brotherhood of Americanism. Black people were left to figure freedom out for themselves. Poverty abounded in the Black community. Military units were used to drive Blacks from their homes rather than protect them. Martha Ayers describes the abject poverty in Macon’s Black community two years after the war ended in a letter to her friend George Whipple:
“A freed woman, Sally Franklin, she is starving—the day is cold, but she is without covering, in an open building, without windows. A baby is wailing at her side, and the mother’s bosom is bare, though her last conscious act had been an effort to nurse her child.”
According to the Macon Telegraph, October 15, 1865:
“Six months after the war Mayor Stephen Collins reported that ‘the city had buried thirty negroes in a one week period, and that of that number nine or ten were picked up dead in the streets and alleys of the city.’”
C. Mildred Thompson, in her book Reconstruction in Georgia, posits:
“As living conditions in the city’s [Macon] Black sections worsened, the rate of disease increased. The
mortality rate among Blacks was frightfully high. In December 1865, about five hundred died compared to the ordinary death rate of only about forty a month.”
These are the conditions the early worshippers confronted as they turned to their faith in God to help them through this nightmare in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
One city official opined that through July 1866, around five thousand Blacks had died in the city and federal hospitals. According to Paul Michael Johnson in his paper, The Negro in Macon, Georgia 1865-1877, “During the epidemic Macon leaders generally maintained a ‘business as usual’ stance…”. They blamed the spread of smallpox squarely upon the Black community.”
The small pox outbreak did not meet pandemic proportions because it was contained in the newly freed Negro communities in Macon and did not spread to White Macon. Probably because the town was segregated by race. Epidemics of smallpox, other diseases, and fires that burn down Black churches usually do not happen in a vacuum.
It is not hard to fathom that Macon’s rapidly growing Black population was cause for concern to White leaders who feared a Black takeover of the commerce of a prosperous section of the state. It would not be the first time that genocidal practices were applied to non-white populations that White Americans wanted to eliminate from participating in the process of American prosperity. See the population of Natives at the Ocmulgee National Mounds.
Such was the political, economic, medical, and moral climate our ancestors endured while organizing this Zion.
Very little information exists to document the members of that early church meeting in the house on the eastern side of the property of W. F. Elder Lumber
Company near Central City Park. Elder specialized in lumber and building supplies.
According to William Richard Cutler in the American Biography, “Mr. Elder was a son of David P. and Nancy (Head) Elder. His father was a planter in Spalding County for many years and was a leader of general affairs of the Methodist Church denomination. By 1910, W. F. Elder Lumber Company had a “capital stock of $12,000.00,” according to the Macon Telegraph. Twelve Thousand Dollars was a nifty sum in early twentieth-century dollars.
Initially, Elder’s Lumber Yard's worshippers were Methodists and Baptists. When the Baptist members of this fellowship left to form a Baptist Church, the Methodists continued to worship on this site. They adhered to the discipline of John and Charles Wesley. The Wesley brothers did not believe in slavery; thus, possibly the founding members of this church were freedmen. In any event, W. F. Elder was probably aware that a group of Negroes were worshipping in a house on his property.
This Methodist Church was made possible by a question raised at the Methodist Conference of 1790: “What can be done to teach poor children (white and black) to read?” The 1790 Conference answered like this, “Let us labor to establish Sunday Schools.”
This resolution was vital to forming Bethel Methodist Church because enslavers in the South had agreed to permit mission schools to teach Christianity to enslaved people.
Thus, within the framework of White Supremacy, for lack of a better term, the church could teach Blacks to read the Bible without running afoul of the law that prohibited the teaching of those in enslavement.
The Methodist Church Connection used this law loophole to teach enslaved people to read. It was still unlawful to teach enslaved Blacks how to write. If an enslaved person could write, Whites feared it would
make them equal to their White enslavers and enable the enslaved to send communication to each other, perhaps plotting and planning to escape from captivity.
In her book Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South, Janet Duitsman Cornelius notes that “Sunday Schools organized and led by blacks [Blacks] thrived in… Macon, Georgia.”
Among this group of church founders was Rev. John Zorn, who could have left the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, along with others in 1844 over the question of slavery but declined to do so.
Zorn may have been the offspring of Rev. Calvin Zorn, a white circuit rider from Virginia who rode the Methodist circuit in Georgia. If Calvin Zorn was his father, this could explain why Rev. John Zorn continued to worship with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South Connectional Church. He pastored Bethel for thirty-one years.
In 1865, The house of worship on Seventh Street and Riverside Drive in Macon was initially known as a Methodist church. It was more likely aligned with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, as the northern church split with the southern church in 1844 over the issue of slavery when Bishop James Osgood Andrews received notice to step down because he held Negroes in captivity. For a moment, the Methodist Church, South gave Andrews a pass, but then his wife inherited two enslaved Negroes, and the connection rose and said Osgood had to go.
Those White worshippers who favored Osgood owning human beings, as one would hold a piece of property, stayed with the Methodist Church, South. Those in opposition split off to form the Methodist Church, North. In 1968, the Methodist Church, North dissolved and formed the United Methodist Church to unite all Methodists. Today, the question of Gay marriage threatens to split the United Methodist, similar to the issue of slavery in the nineteenth century.
Contrary to the Methodist philosophy conceived by John and Charles Wesley, Andrews believed that owning human beings was not inconsistent with the Methodist doctrine; thus, he refused to free the humans he held in captivity. Therefore, the northern Methodists were not active in the southern states following the split of the Methodists Connection in 1844. The liberal Methodist left White southern Methodists to their own devices, owning and selling humans created by the same God who created them.
However, permission to organize missions on plantation property received approval, and Blacks continued to receive help and instructions from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Sometime around 1860 and possibly earlier, a group of Black Methodists held Sunday service on the banks of the Ocmulgee River. Many of these members organized the Holsey Temple C. M. E. Church.
As previously noted, other Black worshippers in this group gathered in a house in a lumber yard near Central City Park on the banks of the Ocmulgee River. The park’s development occurred in 1826, three years after the city’s founding in 1823.
Founding members of what would become the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church were Brother and Sister Washington King, Brother Obie Jackson and his family (Jackson is the grandfather of the late Sister Anna Parker), Brother Reuben Richardson and his family, Brother and Sister Mingo Fickling, Brother and Sister Rena Ballard, Rev. Campbell and his family and Sister Sleina Gibson (Great-granddaughter of Sister Ursula Webb). Tyrone Wyche, who has worshipped at Bethel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church since the early 1960s, is a direct descendant of Sister Sleina Gibson. His grandmother and great-grandmother were the Bethel church family's mainstays for much of the twentieth century's first half.
The congregation grew with the close of the Civil War in 1865. The Baptists who gathered at the house in the lumber yard during what would become the church’s first “Watch Night Service at midnight on January 1, 1863, would soon leave the Dunlap house on the lumber yard property and build a church under a brush arbor, then a physical structure at the corner of Riverside and Seventh Street, then a new church at 1660 Pio Nono Avenue, in West Bibb County, at that time, outside the city limits of Macon, Georgia.
Paul Michael Johnson, in his paper The Negro in Macon, Georgia 1865-1877 summed up this period expertly:
“It is not surprising that Macon [B]lacks in the face of disease, poverty, and critical [W]hites began to look beyond the limits of the city for a better life. During the summer of 1866, some prominent [B]lacks in Macon organized a movement to recruit the city’s [B]lacks for emigration to Liberia…The vast majority of Macon Negroes were trapped in the city by virtue of their poverty, unable to leave the poverty, disease, and injustice that surrounded them; most [B]lacks realized that if their lives were to improve at all, it would have to be in Macon.”
Johnson concludes his study on Negro in Macon, Georgia, 1865-1871 with this dreary assessment of Black life in Macon in the early days of freedom.
“The educational, political, and economic progress of [B]lack Maconites from 1865 through 1871 could hardly be termed satisfactory. When the Civil War ended, Macon [B]lacks had little or no education, political power, or economic status. When 1871 came to [a] close [B]lack, Maconites had schools but still possessed nothing approaching quality education. They had gained some political power during the years, but by the end of 1871, they had lost it all. Also, Macon [B]lacks stilled lived in abject poverty.”
“Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us, Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won.” --James Weldon Johnson, The Negro National Anthem
I don't know about you folks, but I'm furious with what this president has instigated to take us backwards, in this case, to the 1800s! Implementing DEI, for instance, is taking us back to the time when white supremacists--rich men who used slaves--are we any differnt now, except in extent of servitude--to allow them to get richer and richer... Don't be fools! Study the history of our nation! Read this and other books... Search historical videos!
As you can see from this brief excerpt, even laws sometimes cannot force the rich from discriminating in any way they can, to both gain more riches and to cause harm to the rest of us! And the conman in the white house is the worst, and best, of thinking up ways to "use all of us!"
Especially Non-Whites!
Do NOT Allow the use of religion and claims that this is what God wants!
It Is Not True!
Keep listening and learning of God's Truth and His Love!
May God's Voice Speak to YOU!
Gabby
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