First Black Churches

First Black Churches and Congregations in the Choptank River Heritage Area, re-discovered through the journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee.   Jarena Lee (1783-1849) was the first female preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. She left her Philadelphia...

Bishop Wayman’s Long Road Home

I walked 16 miles from Easton to my father’s. I knocked at the door and said, “Who lives here?” Father answered by saying, “Who is that?” I said,  “Me.” Then mother said, “That’s Alexander”– showing a mother never forgets her child. Read Bishop Wayman’s story...

“Tuckahoe” by Robert Durwood Madison

  In observance of Black History Month, we’re publishing Tuckahoe, a cycle of poems which beckon us to learn more about Frederick Douglass’s life and times – and to Stand in the Place. Robert Madison wrote: “By chance, in 1996 I moved to...

How Old Black Churches Die

See the new St. Paul AME Story Map, Where the Dead Rise Up I was scanning aerial photography of Caroline County and saw this striking image in the landscape – above-ground crypts in a church graveyard: The 1897 map shows this was the site of St Paul African...