The meetinghouse is plain, whitewashed walls and rough benches, and the man at the pulpit is the only one in the room who was born to a white mother and an African father and bound out as a servant before he could walk. The congregation before him is almost entirely white. He has come to tell them what he believes God requires of a free people, and he does not soften it for their comfort.
It is 1785.
He does not just leave indentured servitude behind him. The moment his bond ends, he takes up arms as a Minuteman, marching with the militia in the early fighting of the Revolution and setting down his own account of Lexington in verse.
He does not just decline the seminary others might have expected of him. He reads Latin and Greek under local clergymen instead, and in November of 1785 he is ordained a Congregational minister, the first African American known to be ordained by a mainstream Protestant church in the country.
He does not just preach to people who look like him. He pastors mostly white congregations in Connecticut and then Vermont for decades, marrying a white schoolteacher and holding his pulpit through prejudice that costs him one post and never quite leaves him at the next.
He does not just keep his politics out of his sermons. In writing that survives from around the time of the Revolution but was not found until nearly a century and a half after his death, he argues that an African has an undeniable right to his liberty, naming slavery a sin at the very moment the new nation is congratulating itself on freedom.
His Spark of Liberty was a pulpit no law of the land would have granted him, held by force of learning and conviction alone.
He asked the republic to mean what it said about liberty, and he asked it from the one place segregation could not easily reach him, the pulpit, where a congregation that might never have hired him as a neighbor had agreed to receive him as their pastor’s voice on Sunday.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born on July 18, 1753, in West Hartford, Connecticut, to a white mother and an African father who did not raise him, he was bound out at five months old to a Massachusetts deacon who allowed him some schooling alongside his labor. His indenture ended in 1774, after which he served in the militia during the Revolution, then studied theology privately before his 1785 ordination in Torrington, Connecticut. He pastored in Torrington and then West Rutland, Vermont, for thirty years, later serving congregations in Manchester, Vermont, and Granville, New York. In 1804 Middlebury College awarded him an honorary master’s degree, the first such honor given to an African American in the country, and in 1801 he published a tract linking true republican government to divine and moral law. He died on September 18, 1833, in Granville, New York, at the age of eighty.
His name was Lemuel Haynes.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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