Savannah, Ga., October 5, 2016 - The Georgia Historical Society will dedicate a new historical marker to Trinity Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, 818 8th Street, Augusta, Friday October 7, 2016 at 11:00 a.m.
Mistress of Ceremony will be Mrs. Joyce Law, Program Manager, Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, other speakers will include, Mrs. Christine Miller-Betts, Executive Director, Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History; Georgia State Representative Wayne Howard; The Honorable Hardie Davis, Mayor, Augusta; Commissioner William Fennoy, District 1, Augusta-Richmond County; Erick Montgomery, Executive Director of Historic Augusta, Inc.; and D. Bishop Kenneth W. Carter, Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. There will also be a special acknowledgement of the Founder’s Descendants from Reverend Herman Mason, Senior Pastor, Trinity C.M.E. Church.
A reception will immediately follow at the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, located on 1116 Phillips Street.
The historical marker reads:
Trinity CME
“Mother Trinity”
Trinity Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) was established in 1840 as a separate congregation by African-American members of St. John Methodist Episcopal Church-South. Here, at Trinity’s original location, three bishops were elected at the 1873 CME General Convention, including Lucius H. Holsey, a primary founder of Augusta’s Paine College. Trinity continued to produce influential congregants, both locally and nationally, including Trinity pastor Henry Sebastian Doyle, a controversial but influential leader of Negro Populism, an agrarian-populist movement of the late nineteenth century. Other prominent members included John Wesley Gilbert, the first African-American faculty member of Paine College, and NAACP Chairman Channing Tobias, who instituted the CME name change from “Colored Methodist Episcopal” to “Christian Methodist Episcopal” in 1954. Due to soil contamination, Trinity’s congregation relocated to the Glenn Hills Community in 2001.
Erected by the Georgia Historical Society, Trinity CME Church, and Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History
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