By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Black Baptists in Waco can trace their lineage to the banks of the Brazos River, where under a large oak tree slaves gathered in worship on Sundays.

In the months following emancipation in Texas in June 1865, some blacks in Waco — Baptists and Methodists — worshipped at the city’s First Baptist Church, sitting in the balcony during services.

In 1866, the congregation’s pastor, the Rev. S.G. O’Bryan, and two Baylor University officials, President Rufus Burleson and Vice President Richard Burleson, organized the first black church in town with 18 charter members. That initial congregation later split into New Hope Baptist Church and Mount Zion Methodist Church.

New Hope Baptist Church, now located at 915 N. Sixth St., counts itself the oldest black Baptist congregation in Waco.

Historian and author William D. Carrigan noted that from the end of the Civil War through 1875, some 15 black churches were started throughout McLennan County.

Although churches were a refuge for black Wacoans during the Reconstruction era, some Central Texas whites saw the rise of a black intelligentsia as a threat, according to Carrigan in his 2004 study, The Making of a Lynching Culture. Physical attacks on black churches and schools were not uncommon.

Naomi R. Cobb, a former slave, noted in church records housed at the Texas Collection at Baylor University that New Hope services were “sometimes disturbed by lawless people of the other race. One Sunday night while Rev. Cobb was conducting a heated revival, some desperados fired two shots through a window of the church.”

The first church home, which was used on alternating Sundays by the Baptists and Methodists, was an abandoned foundry at Jefferson Avenue and Sixth Street that rented for $2 per month. That structure served for several years.

In 1873, a simple frame structure, whose address is apparently no longer known, was the next church home until 1884, when work began on a two-story edifice — brick basement and frame ground floor sanctuary — for New Hope. That sanctuary in downtown Waco was the church’s home for almost 40 years. New Hope moved into its current home, at 915 N. Sixth St., in May 1923.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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