Black History Month in a Year Series: Wayne County’s African American Early 19thCentury Religious Leaders
Black History Month in a Year Series
Wayne County’s African American Early 19thCentury Religious Leaders
Wayne County is well known for churches with predominantly Black congregations. They make vibrant contributions to the life of county residents in just about every town in the county. Less known is the fact that African American religious leaders have been providing spiritual sustenance to their congregants in Wayne County for over two hundred years. According to the research of former Wayne County Historian, Marjory Perez, ministers such as George Shumway, James Gregg, and Abram Pryne often served several different congregations, living in parsonages or rented houses rather than in identifiable homes of their own. Most prominent among the leaders, Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward, was an abolitionist, newspaper publisher (editor and part owner of two newspapers; the Farmer and Northern Star, and Boston's Impartial Citizen, Wikipedia) and author (Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: his anti-slavery labours in the United States, Canada and England). Rev. Ward was the first African American minister in Wayne County when he became pastor of the Congregational Church of South Butler. He lent his organizational and oratorical skills to the Free Congregational Church in Sodus. That church had been formed on the principles of abolitionism by former members of the Sodus First Presbyterian Church when the national Presbyterian Church refused to formally reject slavery. Like many free Black male and female leaders in Upstate New York, Rev. Ward spent much time in Canada establishing safe environments, building activist organizations like the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada and by traveling to Great Britain at the invitation of the anti-slavery movement there to raise funds for freedom in North America.