Sublime

Behind the monument was my destination: the First African Baptist Church of Savannah. It is the oldest Black church in North America. It was constituted in 1777, but first organized in 1773 by Pastor George Leile. Leile departed several years later. After fighting on the side of the British in the Revolutionary War, he was granted his freedom and,

“I had much rather starve in England, a free woman than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”

the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments.

In the middle of the last century, Lewis marched into the line of fire to summon a nation to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. Arrested forty-five times over the course of his life, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed. He led by example more than by words. He was a peaceful soldier