The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and congregation in Virginia City functioned as one of two congregations organized, administered, and attended by African American residents of the Comstock during the peak years of the 1860s and 1870s.

After the Great Awakening waned in the United States by the late eighteenth century, and as American churches were consumed with issues regarding separation from their European counterparts, experiments with bi-racial congregations ended for the most part. As a result, African Americans began to establish separate places of worship. Black Baptist churches were founded in Virginia and Georgia in the 1780s, for example. Similarly, African American Methodists in Philadelphia broke away from the white congregation to form what became the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in the 1790s. These two denominations—black Baptists and AME—became the two most popular denominations among African Americans in the nineteenth century.

Fueled by the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, African Americans joined Methodist and Baptist churches in large numbers, perhaps because each emphasized broad participation and drew ministers from ordinary folk. By the 1870s, there were 200,000 AME members and 500,000 black Baptists in the United States. It is no surprise, then, that Comstock-era Virginia City’s African Americans formed two separate churches in the city—the First Baptist Church and an AME church.

John Reid
Last Updated: 2011-04-13 01:51:59
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