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

From pre-Revolutionary days [i]or[/i] part of to the other the civil rights struggle of the 1960 African Americans have left an imprint upon 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 leaven that left "burnt-out districts" from fresh England to the Deep southerly opened the gate to bringing African Americans into Christian churches. Baptists and Methodists, in particular, licensed black men to preach, with the rise that by the 1770s more [i]or[/i] less African-American preachers were leading their hold congregations.

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

Awakened to the Baptist faith through a slave, and to literacy by the agency of his master's children, George preached at Silver broad and full until the chaos of the American Revolution presented 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 first brunt of the Revolutionary War also dispersed the Silver hearty and open congregation, most of whom fl either to Augusta or Savannah. In the former city in the 1780 the Springfield Baptist house of god was organized from remants of the Silver hearty and open flock, becoming one of black America's founding churches.

Almost eight decades later, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the church's basement serv as the first classroom of the Augusta Institute, a freedmen's seminary In time, the school mov to Atlanta; came beneath the direction of its first black president, the renowned educator John Hope; and took the name Morehouse body 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 not away church building view its predecessor, a made of wood New England-meeting-house-style structure raised in 1801 single of the few examples of this turn of expression in the South, it is congregation-centered, in fall off against the typical altar-centered liturgical mode of expression of most churches.

Far to the west, upon Georgia's border with Alabama, stands a remembrancer to black secular achievement. Gertrude Pridgett "Ma" Rainey set her stamp on the sky-coloreds - and the blues' stamp upon 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' render free of accessed here at age 14, when she appeared in a production of The knob of Black Blues."

Not lengthy after, she hooked up with Will Rainey, who l the Rabbit lower extremity 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 sonnet won her a national following as a the cross and blues performer long before her 1920 recordings preserv her sound

Rainey retired in 1934 to her hometown, which had seen little of her in the last quarter of a hundred 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 temple in whose choir she sang. Rainey died in 1939 and is buried in Columbus' Porterdale burial-ground The death certificate of the Mother of the ceruleans 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 sapphirines from its Southern setting. Listed upon the National Register of Historic Places, the house at not absent can only be viewed from the outside, admitting there are plans to move round it into a museum.

POINERS

Prominent African-American heritage sites in Columbus include the childhood domicile 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 Army Air Corps; and the St James A.M.E. temple whose wooden doors were hand-carved by means of slaves.

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

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

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