In the early twentieth century, Georgia was home to 334,000 Black Baptists, more than any other state. Black churches needed preachers—even young, inexperienced, unschooled preachers such as the Reverend Michael King. More than 90 percent of America’s ten million people of African ancestry—Negroes, as polite people called them at the time—lived in the South in the first decades of the century, usually in segregated communities.
