Image Courtesy of Lucy Craft Laney Museum

Year Erected: 2016

*Marker Text: 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

*Marker not in place due to damage or maintenance.