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PERRY, Rufus Lewis (11 Mar. 1834-18 June 1895), Baptist minister and editor, was born a slave on the plantation of Archibald W. Overton in Smith County, Tennessee, the son of Lewis Perry and Maria (maiden name unknown). His father, an able mechanic and cabinetmaker, was able to hire his own time from his owner and move his family to Nashville, where Perry was ranked as a free child and allowed to attend a school for free blacks. But when his father fled to freedom in Canada in 1841, the family was deprived of their temporary freedom and forced to return to Overton’s plantation.

The education that the young Perry had received, and his continued self-education, were sufficient to elicit the contempt of fellow slaves and the alarm of white people, and, as a result, he was sold in August 1852 to a slave trader who intended to take him to Mississippi. Perry, however, remained with the trader only three weeks before he made his own escape to freedom in Canada. He ended up in Windsor, Ontario, where he continued his studies and taught other fugitive slaves. In 1854 he experienced a call to the ministry. He then studied at the Kalamazoo Seminary in Michigan and was ordained on 9 October 1861 as the pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He later served churches in St. Catherines, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York, until he moved around 1870 to Brooklyn, New York, where he organized the Messiah Baptist Church and served as pastor until his death. Perry married Charlotte Handy; they had seven children.

Perry served from 1867 to 1879 as corresponding secretary of the Consolidated American Baptist Missionary Convention (CABMC), which was organized in 1867 following the merger of two regional African-American Baptist bodies. Through the CABMC and its affiliate, the American Educational Association, Perry offered a powerful countervailing voice for African Americans in response to the paternalism of the predominately white American Baptist Home Mission Society, which sought to dominate Baptist missionary and educational efforts among the freedmen. He was coeditor of CABMC-sponsored publications, the American Baptist (1869-1871) and the National Monitor (1872-1879), becoming editor of the latter in 1879. He argued that the existence of the CABMC was necessary because of racial prejudice and that this black organization should have primary responsibility for work among black southerners. He framed the issue as nothing less that true faith versus idolatry, maintaining that black missionaries were necessary, otherwise “strangers will come in and introduce strange gods.”

Perry served from 1867-1879 as vice president of the board of managers of the National Theological Institute and University, founded in 1864 in Washington, D.C., to train black Baptist ministers. The school failed, however, in 1872 because of infighting between the black administrators and the white sponsors. Justin D. Fulton, one of the sponsors, joined the executive board of the CABMC in 1877, hoping to remove Perry, who was implicated in some questionable financial practices; the allegations were never proved and Perry was cleared of suspicion. Nevertheless, the CABMC disbanded in1879. The successful consolidation of African-American Baptists on a national scale would not occur until the National Baptist convention was formed in 1895, shortly after Perry’s death in Brooklyn.

Although Perry lost much of his national influence over black Baptist life with the dissolution of the CABMC, he continued to be a voice for racial justice and activism, using the remaining CABMC assets to support publications and mission work in Haiti. He also remained corresponding secretary of the abolitionist American Baptist Free Mission Society, which was a “paper organization,” having effectively dissolved in 1872 following the emancipation of the slaves.

Perry’s literary efforts also include editing the Sunbeam and the People’s Journal, occasional publications for black Baptists. In his only book, The Cushite; or, The descendant of Ham as Seen by Ancient Historians (1893), he drew upon his interest in African history, classics, and black Masonry to produce a defense of black cultural nationalism, arguing that the ancient Ethiopians and Egyptians were the black descendants of Ham and destined for “a return of racial celebrity, when in the light of a Christian civilization, Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God” (p. x). This book along with his other writings and his leadership among Baptists earned for Perry a place as one of the most articulate religious spokespersons for African-American causes in the second half of the nineteenth century.

-American National Biography

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