Caesar Blackwell
Caesar Blackwell (1769–1845) was an enslaved African-American preacher in Alabama, one of a number of black preachers in the South who preached to a mixed congregation. He was either bought or freed by the Alabama Baptist Association, and preached in the Antioch Baptist Church in Montgomery County, Alabama. Biography Caesar Blackwell was enslaved by a John Blackwell. In 1821, "by experience and baptism" he joined the Antioch Baptist Church, which had been founded three years before by James McLemore, a preacher who had come from Georgia. He preached to an audience of both blacks and whites, and, a modern historian notes, drew "standing-room-only crowds". His freedom Sources do not agree on one important fact of Blackwell's life. Some sources claim his freedom was bought in 1825 by the Alabama Baptist Association, an association of Baptist churches founded in 1819; this account is given by Albert J. Raboteau, who cites B. F. Riley (History of the Baptists in the Southern States East of the Mississippi, Philadelphia, 1898, pp. 318–19): "After Blackwell's owner died, the Alabama Baptist Association bought and freed the slave to preach to his people". Others disagree: Wayne Flint, in his Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of