#102: The Second African Baptist Church on Greene Square
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will
not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (‘I have a Dream’ speech, 1963)
The Second African Baptist Church on Greene Square
Named after Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Greene, Greene Square is among the three city squares located near the eastern edge of Savannah’s Historic District. Nathaniel Greene was General George Washington’s most talented and dependable general during the American Revolution. He wore two well-deserved monikers expressing his military career: The Fighting Quaker and The Savior of the South.
After the war, Greene retired to his Mulberry Grove Plantation located just outside Savannah, where a guest at the plantation named Eli Whitney later invented the cotton gin.
In 1802, members of the rapidly growing and overflowing First African Baptist Church (see PFS-48) split off to form a new congregation on Greene Square aptly named The Second African Baptist Church. The newer congregation attracted the wealthier members of the free Black community in Savannah.
The original wooden church burned down in one of Savannah’s many fires. In 1825, its congregation built this replacement building. Inside are the original church pulpit, prayer benches, and choir chairs.
The Black evangelical church became the cornerstone of the Black community in antebellum Savannah. The Second African Baptist Church elected paster Henry Cunningham, a slave of mixed race who would soon after receive his freedom and become one of Savannah’s wealthiest Black businessmen. He became a landowner and came to own as many as five African slaves, with his primary income derived from renting land and hiring out his slaves.
In 1829, a freedman and abolitionist named David Walker published a famous pamphlet — An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World — calling for a Black revolution to end slavery in America. A white seaman visiting the Savannah port gave a copy to Henry Cunningham, who chose not to distribute it.
Still, the pamphlet caused a firestorm in Savannah. The mayor ordered Savannah city police to confiscate and destroy any of Walker’s pamphlets they could find. Quickly, both the state of Georgia and the city of Savannah passed laws prohibiting the teaching of resident Blacks to read and write. Ordinances also forbid free Black seamen from meeting with slaves while visiting Savannah.
Pastor Henry Cunningham made his most significant mark on the African Baptist Church in Georgia by training several other preachers who later led Black churches of their own in the area. Like Cunningham, many African Baptist evangelists were former slaves themselves.
After accepting the surrender of Savannah in December 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman drafted his Special Field Order No. 15, known colloquially as the ‘40 Acres and a Mule’ program. On February 3, 1865, Union officer Rufus Saxton read the order to African Americans gathered in front of The Second Baptist Church on Greene Square. Saxton later served as a commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau (see PFS-98), settling newly freed African Americans on land confiscated using Sherman’s field order. President Johnson ended and reversed that practice after Lincoln’s assassination.
In the summer of 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Savannah and gave a practice version of his infamous ‘I Have Dream’ speech that he delivered on August 28, 1963, from the Lincoln Memorial steps. Here in Savannah, the Congregants at the Second African Baptist Church heard King’s ringing words first. That event is memorialized each year at this beautiful church on Greene Square.
