LaVilla Reconstruction Religion

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
One obstacle to understanding religious beliefs in LaVilla when James Weldon Johnson was a child is the lack of resources.  A great many African Americans are Baptists [1] but, because the denomination lacks the centralized structure of Methodists, it lacks the latter’s archives and central reports.  As mentioned in the post for 5 March 2023, James Bryant found details in popular religious publications like The Christian Index.

Joe Richardson found another source in reports by agents for the Freedmen’s Bureau.  C. M. Hamilton noted “freed slaves were strictly, and peculiarly, a religious people” who attended “services in churches and brush arbors on Sundays and Wednesday evenings.” [2]  Jacob Remley thought “this faculty of veneration appears to be such that it is a hard matter to engage their minds in any other direction.” [3]  In Jacksonville, one man told Edward L’Engle he needed a cook who was “not partial to all night prayer meetings.” [4]

Revivals periodically swept through the town.  In 1871, whites complained the services were noisy and lasted all night. [5]  Two years later, Jonathon Gibbs admitted African Americans “still preach and pray, sing and shout all night long,” but noted “many of the things that shock good taste and good morals, which a few years ago were so prevalent, have passed away.” [6]

Gibbs was raised free in Philadelphia, and became a Presbyterian minister in 1856.  The Black was active in Abolitionist activities during the Civil War, which led him to Charleston, South Carolina in 1865.  Two years later he moved to Jacksonville where he opened a school for Freedmen, and became active in Reconstruction politics.  By 1868 he was holding office in Tallahassee. [7]

Johnson’s grandmother affiliated with a Methodist church that had been organized by a northern white missionary in 1866. [8]  It followed the standard protocols of the white denomination, including love feasts [9] and weekly prayer meetings [10].  In 1880, a traveling evangelist descended on the church.

Years later, Johnson recalled:

“In these revival meetings the decorum of the regular Sunday services gave way to something primitive.  It was hard to realize that this was the same congregation which on Sunday mornings sat listening to the preacher’s exegesis of this text and joining in singing conventional hymns and anthems led by a choir.  Now the scene is changed.  The revivalist rants and roars, he exhorts and implores, he warns and threatens.  The air is charged.  Overlaid emotions come to the surface.  A woman gives a piercing scream and begins to ‘shout’; then another, and another.  The more hysterical ones must be held to be kept from ‘shouting’ out of their clothes.” [11]

Willis Williams arrived in Jacksonville in 1879 as a mail clerk for the Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad.  At some time, he joined Johnson’s grandmother’s church.  In 1937, he told Viola Muse:

“The manner of worship was very much in keeping with present day modes.  Preachers appealed to the emotions of the ‘flock’ and the congregation responded with ‘amens,’ ‘halleluia,’ clapping of hands, shouting and screaming.” [12]

Saint Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church erected a building in LaVilla in 1883 [13] that was  between the homes of Johnson’s parents and his grandmother.  He remembered that, as a young adolescent, he often heard “the weird music and the sound of thudding feet” when he “woke suddenly.” [14]

Francis Asbury turned camp meetings into sites for annual conferences of Methodists before the Civil War. [15]  The AME church continued the practice.  In 1875, it held its annual meeting near Jacksonville for eleven days. [16]

Camp meetings continued beyond the purview of the press and neighbors who had to work every day and so could not be kept awake by noisy services.  Edward Lycurgis was born in 1872 in Saint Augustine.  He recalled that “all work ceased in a vicinity where a camp meeting was held. Farmers flocked to the meeting from all parts of Saint Johns County.”  They lasted for several days, and the “the stirring sermons and spirituals that rang through the woods and could be heard for several miles on a clear day.”  The meetings culminated in river baptisms where the preferred song was “Take Me to the River To Be Baptized. [17]

End Notes
1.  More than half the African Americans, who attended church in Florida in the late 1930s, were Baptists.  The “African Methodist” church was second. [18]  The current percentage of Baptist is 49.08%.  Methodist churches attract 5.88% of the Black population, and Pentecostal groups 8.62%. [19]

2.  C. M. Hamilton.  Report to J. G. Foster, 31 May 1867.  Bureau Records for Florida.  Quoted by Joe M. Richardson.  The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 1865-1877.  Tallahassee: The Florida State University, 1965.  86-87.

3.  Jacob A. Remley.  Report to A. H. Jackson, 1 October 1868.  Bureau Records for Florida.  Quoted by Richardson.  87.

4.  S. D. McConnell.  Letter to E. M. L’Engle, 1 December 1869.  Quoted by Richardson.  87.  L’Engle, the brother of the man who established LaVilla, is discussed in the post for 19 March 2023.  Emphasis in the original.

5.  Courier, Jacksonville, Florida, October 1871.  Quoted by Richardson.  89.

6.  Jonathon Gibbs.  The Florida Agriculturalist 1:23:17 January 1874.  Quoted by Richardson.  89.

7.  “Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 21 April 2023.

8.  For more on the history of Ebenezer Methodist Church, see the post for 12 February 2023.

9.  James Weldon Johnson.  Along This Way.  New York: The Viking Press, 1933.  129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews.  New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.  166.

10.  Johnson.  165.
11.  Johnson.  161.

12.  Willis Williams.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Viola B. Muse on 20 March 1937.  In George Rawick.  A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume 3, Florida Narratives.  Compiled by The Library of Congress from interviews by the Works Projects Administration, Federal Writers’ Project.  Washington: Library of Congress, 1941.  Reprinted by Greenwood Press of Westport, Connecticut, in 1972.  Williams was born in 1856 in Tallahassee, and lived in the city where his mother was the cook for a local merchant.

13.  Saint Paul’s AME church is discussed in the post for 12 February 2023.
14.  Johnson.  158.

15.  See the post for 8 November 2020 for more on Asbury’s use of camp meetings following the Cane Ridge Revival.

16.  Sentinel, Tallahassee, Florida, 11 September 1875.  Cited by Richardson.  89-90.  Black camp meetings are discussed in the post for 15 March 2020 on the area surrounding New Bern, North Carolina.

17.  Edward Lycurgis.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Pearl Randolph on 5 December 1936.  In Rawick.  He moved to Jacksonville’s Clara White Mission in his old age.

18.  The Florida Negro, edited by Gary W. McDonogh.  Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.  109.  Based on unpublished work by the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project in Florida, which is discussed in the post for 30 April 2023.  The manuscript did not use the terms African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the white Methodist Episcopal Church that sponsored the church Johnson attended, and the Black offshoot of the ME church.  I assume their ranking is based on the sum of some of these groups.

19.  Robert Joseph Taylor, Linda M. Chatters, and R. Khari Brown.  “African American Religious Participation.”  Review of Religious Research 56:513-38:2014.