Union Missionary Baptist Church
Here you’ll be standing in one of the most ancient places in Africatown
Before there was a church, this place was called the Praying Ground. This was a spiritual gathering place for the emancipated Africans who survived the Clotilda slave ship and started this community. Before they became Christians, it was here in a wooded area they reserved for communicating with the African gods.
As you know, the Clotilda was the last American slave ship that sailed illegally in 1860 from Ouidah (in modern-day Benin) to smuggle enslaved Africans into the United States — some 52 years AFTER the Congress had outlawed the Transatlantic slave trade. The story of the audacity and greed of the ship's owner, Timothy Meaher, is told in the Heritage House exhibit.
With the end of the Civil War came emancipation, and survivors and descendants of that ship settled around this piece of land in Magazine Point. Their community would come to be called Africatown. Oluale Kossola was one of these prominent founding leaders—himself a survivor of enslavement—and went by the name Cudjoe Lewis. He and other Africans stolen on the Clotilda would build their own houses, and cultivate their own gardens with crops that they knew from their west African villages, such as corn, beans, and yams. They also grew English peas, black-eyed peas, blackberries, figs, scuppemong grapes, and peaches. So our community's entire heritage of ecology and cultivation, of homeland, and African traditions, traces back to this site.
By 1869, Cudjo and many of his shipmates had incorporated Christian practices into their African religion, and they became members of the congregation at Stone Street Baptist Church in Mobile. Just three years later, they founded their own: “The Old Landmark (Baptist) Church” ...and that institution was renamed in 1903 to what it is today: Union Baptist Church.
In its day, The Old Landmark Church was also the where Africatown had its first school. But this site would change over time — for one, it was no longer the woods! In 1918 the church building was rebuilt (and would be reconstructed again in 1955). Cudjo Lewis became the church's sexton, responsible for ringing the bell. As Mama Eva recalled:
“Every week Uncle Cudjo had a bench out there at the church. He would take all the lamps out there and set them on that bench. He’d wash the globes and fill the lamps and take them back in the church. Those lamps would be sparkling clean. I’d get down on my little knees with a bucket and somebody else’s children, and we would scrub that church. Uncle Cudjo and his wife would fix them lamps and wash them benches off and have them beautiful. And we enjoyed it. Yes we did. It was beautiful.”
Outside the church stands the Clotilda Founders historical marker, which enshrines a memory of the original African & Yoruba names of Africatown’s founders. While you are visiting Union Missionary Baptist Church, pause and remember the places where you come from, too. The church that stands here has the power of its members' strong faith. But the ground below it also holds a great power of place: here we honor the homeland that Cudjo and his shipmates remembered but never saw again: a homeland that preceded Africatown.
