Chapter Seven


The Renegade Baptist, 1885–1887

What my great-grandfather did and where he lived between 1880 and early 1885 is a mystery. Knowing that he ultimately became a Baptist preacher, I spent hours in the Boston Public Library searching for his name in the many rolls of microfilm documenting the early history of African American Baptists. I studied newspaper accounts of tent revivals and prayer meetings and foraged in archives hoping to find some reference to him. I had no luck. Later he would claim to have performed over eight thousand baptisms and to have officiated at fifteen hundred weddings.1 But John Bird Wilkins's name does not appear in any of the many histories written about the black Baptists of this period. He doesn't appear in Patrick Thompson's 575-page History of the Negro Baptists in Mississippi, or in Reverend J. A. Whitted's History of the Negro Baptists of North Carolina. His name is not among the many ministers profiled in William Hicks's encyclopedic History of Louisiana Negro Baptists from 1804 to 1914.²

When I was next able to pick up his trail, my great-grandfather was working, not as a minister but as a teacher, in the town of Farmington, Missouri. Located about sixty miles south of St. Louis along the trade route between Missouri's lead-mining region and the Mississippi River, Farmington was a major station on the Iron Mountain Railway. Although the town is nearly three hundred miles from John Bird's last known residence in Oxford, Mississippi, trains ran regularly between Memphis and St. Louis.

Unlike many areas of the Midwest, Missouri had a significant African American population. Although their state had remained in the Union during the Civil War, Missourians had also owned slaves; racial segregation was enforced both by custom and by law throughout the state. Blacks were not welcome at Farmington's white churches, lodges, schools, or community organizations, so they formed their own organizations, built their own churches, and ran their own schools.³

In 1870 the city of Farmington erected its first public school. But the new building, by state law, was to be used only by white students.4 This lack of dedicated classroom space might have presented a challenge to an inexperienced teacher, but John Bird Wilkins, when he arrived in Farmington sometime around 1884, was no longer a newcomer to the teaching profession. Nor, apparently, was he a newcomer to grassroots organizing. Within months of relocating to Farmington, my great-grandfather emerged as a community leader, remembered by his contemporary J. W. Cayce as being “the most efficient school teacher that has ever been in our midst.”⁵

On January 12, 1885, Wilkins organized a group called the Colored Working Men's Association to build a gathering place for Farmington's African American community. Under his leadership, money for the project was raised. Every member of the organization was required to pay dues. The Working Men's Association held fund-raising picnics, sponsored festivals, and sent letters to community members asking for contributions. Even civic-minded citizens from Farmington's white community gave money to the project.⁶

Construction on the new hall began in the winter of 1885.⁷ Upon completion the building, commonly known as Colored Hall, became an all-purpose home for several of Farmington's black social organizations. Parties, graduations, meetings, and other major community events were held there. St. Paul's Church met there. Later St. Luke's African Methodist Episcopal Church also used the building. The Prince Hall Masons and the Black Knights of Pythias held their initiations upstairs and their large meetings downstairs.⁸ Before the two-room schoolhouse on Douglas Street was built, the hall also served as a schoolhouse for black students.⁹

And I imagine that it was here in Colored Hall, perhaps during a lodge event or a church social that my great-grandfather, now calling himself Professor Bird J. Wilkins, first met Susie Douthit. The Douthits lived an easy walk from Colored Hall, not too far from Ethelean Cayce. Susie's parents had married immediately after the Civil War and had six children. Hilliard Douthit, who worked in a sawmill to support his family, was a prominent figure in Farmington's black community and in the 1870s had helped to found St. Paul's Church.¹⁰ Douthit was active in the Prince Hall Masons, so it is likely that he and my great-grandfather attended lodge meetings together.¹¹

In 1885, John Bird Wilkins was around thirty-five years old, and single. Contemporary accounts describe him as a charismatic speaker with a pleasing voice and an arresting gaze.¹² He was a slender man with fair skin, a full head of dark wavy hair, and a handlebar mustache.¹³ I imagine that many women would have found him attractive.

I wish I had a picture of Susie Douthit. I'd like to imagine my great-grandmother as the town beauty. Fifty years after her death, my Uncle Ernest described her as being a “petite brown-skinned woman.” What I do know for sure is that Susie was Hilliard Douthit's baby girl, and she was only seventeen when she met my great-grandfather. Although she could read and write, Susie had probably never been outside of Farmington in her entire life. I can easily imagine that she was swept off her feet by my handsome, and well-traveled, great-grandfather. Where, or if, she and John Bird were married remains a mystery. A diligent search yielded no record of their marriage in any of the states where they lived.

By the summer of 1885 the couple had left Farmington and given birth to their first child. And “Professor” Bird J. Wilkins had not only created a brand-new family, he had also created a brand-new career for himself. “Professor” Wilkins had become “Reverend” Bird J. Wilkins, Baptist minister.

I had always known that there were a lot of ministers in my family. Aunt Marjory and my mother had each told me stories about their respective fathers, both distinguished Methodist clergymen. But a Baptist in the family? Back when I was a kid, I remember Aunt Marj teaching me to sing the following ditty: “I'm a Methodist born, I'm a Methodist bred. When you put me in the ground, I'll be a Methodist dead. Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!” To find we had a Baptist in the family was definitely a whole new concept.

As a musician I've played for synagogues, mosques, Buddhist meditation groups, and Christian denominations of all stripes. What would a service at my great-grandfather's church have been like? Was John Bird a majestic, scholarly speaker? Or did he have a more dramatic preaching style? Did he ever “get the Spirit,” dance a holy dance, or speak in tongues? Perhaps my attraction to the sacred trance aspects of African religion had a closer genetic source than I had previously imagined. For years I had sought a deeper connection to my roots, and to my ancestors. Now that I was finally getting to know something about my earliest Wilkins forbearer, I was discovering we had a lot in common.

One thing I did not have in common with John Bird, however, was his elusive nature. The man was full of surprises. How did he manage to transform himself from a farm laborer into an accomplished schoolteacher and then become a Baptist minister?

It does not appear that he received any formal training for his new job. None of the colleges where he claimed to have studied reveal any record of his ever having been a student. However, as the slave of a Presbyterian minister, John Bird would have had plenty of opportunity to become intimately familiar with Christian theology and with the Bible. And it is quite possible that he joined the Baptist church in Oxford as a boy. In the years prior to Emancipation, Oxford's Baptist church welcomed slave members, even those whose masters were not Baptists themselves.14 The Baptist religion emphasizes the supremacy of personal experience over formal hierarchy; in the early days of the black Baptist church, the deacons of individual churches had the authority to ordain their own clergy.15 Perhaps this is how my great-grandfather became a minister. Whatever his formal credentials, John Bird Wilkins possessed two essential qualifications for a life in the ministry: he was a charismatic speaker and a brilliant organizer who knew how to inspire people.

In July 1885 my great-grandfather moved northward with his young bride to begin his new career as the pastor of Pilgrim Baptist Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Drawn by the prospect of jobs in the city's meatpacking industry, railroads, and hotels, many African Americans migrated to St. Paul after the Civil War. According to local historian Yusef Mgeni, between 1850 and 1890 “a higher percentage of African Americans in Saint Paul owned land and were literate than in any other part of the country.”¹⁶

Located on Sibley Street in the heart of the black community, Pilgrim Baptist Church had been founded in 1866 by Rev. Robert Thomas Hickman and a small band of former slaves from Boone County, Missouri. I do not know how my great-grandfather came to know about this church. It is possible he might have been recommended for his position by a mutual acquaintance in Missouri. John Bird had been the secretary of his lodge back in Memphis, Tennessee, and had organized the construction of a fraternal meeting hall in Farmington. Pastor Hickman was also a Mason, so perhaps the two men had a fraternal connection. When Pastor Hickman retired in 1885, my great-grandfather, now calling himself the Reverend Bird J. Wilkins, became Pilgrim's new pastor.¹⁷

When I first arrived in Boston, I knew only a handful of people. It took me several years to build a network of friends, and a decade to find a decent job. It seems my great-grandfather was not challenged in either of these departments. Not only did he install himself in a great job despite the lack of any previous experience or formal training, he also went out of his way to be noticed on the local scene. Almost as soon as he arrived in town, he took himself over to the local black paper and introduced himself.¹⁸ And within only a few months of moving to St. Paul, he found himself embroiled in an international controversy.

Louis Riel was the charismatic leader of the mixed-race Métis Indians, a French-speaking tribe whose ancestors included both Europeans and Native Americans. In November 1885, Riel led a bloody revolt against the British authorities in Canada. Riel's trial and ultimate execution by the Canadian government was a subject of heated discussion on both sides of the border. The doomed rebellion would have made a big impact on my great-grandfather. As a former slave with a racially mixed background, he probably took a vicarious satisfaction in seeing another man of mixed race fight so valiantly against white oppression.

In early December 1885, Rev. Bird Wilkins addressed the Riel controversy from his pulpit at Pilgrim Baptist Church. Whatever his formal education may have been, by this point my great-grandfather had become an eloquent speaker whose interests went well beyond conventional religious subjects. The Christian Recorder, a black newspaper in Philadelphia, quoted his sermon verbatim under the following headline: “A Defense of Riel. A Sermon by Rev. Bird Wilkins Glorifying Riel as a Patriot Who Will Live in History, and Condemning the Action of Sir John Macdonald.”

My great-grandfather's sermon is powerful, articulate, and full of dramatic rhetorical flourishes. “A principle which is a true one can never be blotted out,” he states. “The pen of posterity, dipped in the blood of martyrs, will re-write it, or else, with the charcoals of the ruined prosperity of their ancestors, will they mark on memory's pages the hideous sights of a grand and noble principle being burned by the power of an oppressive government.”19

I was not able to find any record of an official Canadian response to Bird's statements. I did find, however, that his sermon was quoted extensively in a chapter on Riel's rebellion that was written thirty years later by the French Canadian historian Paul Vibert.²⁰ Clearly, the speech had made enough of an impression in the French-speaking community for Vibert to include it in his history.

Although my great-grandfather remained in St. Paul for less than two years, his pastorate appears to have been a success. Under Bird's leadership the church was able to purchase a lot on Cedar and Summit Streets, where a new, larger church was built.²¹ And, in one of his first projects as pastor, my great-grandfather created a literary society where church members met weekly to discuss the literary interests of the day.

In addition to tending to his congregation and raising his young son, Charles, my great-grandfather also published a newspaper while in St. Paul. Published quarterly, the Pulpit and Desk was Bird's personal platform. He was its owner, editor, and publisher. Although no copies of the newspaper survive today, Bird would later claim it had a circulation of over five thousand readers.²²

St. Paul had been good to John Bird Wilkins, providing him a place to hone his new identity as a clergyman. But in the spring of 1887, my great-grandfather decided to uproot his family once again. This time the Wilkins family would be making their new home on the south side of Chicago.