Charles Octavius Boothe.

You may have never heard his name. Until four years ago, I hadn’t.

I was struggling to stay awake in day two of an eight-hour church history class when my professor mentioned him. At the time, all he could only offer us was a photo of Boothe. With the fuzzy, black and white picture in the background, my professor explained how our knowledge of church history was limited because many of its documents, like Boothe’s systematic theological handbook, had been lost.

My heart bounced back in forth as I looked at Boothe’s photo. I was proud that an African American man, who was born a slave, had accomplished writing a systematic theology with limited access to education and resources. Yet I was angry that his theological reflections about God, humanity, salvation, the church, and last days weren’t available for me to read.

I felt seen and excluded—seen because my professor highlighted Boothe’s story; excluded because unlike others in the room, I had yet to experience my faith through the lens of someone who looked like me.

Bound to the Book

Charles Octavius Boothe (1845–1925) was born on June 13 in Mobile, Alabama, and was the legal property of Nathaniel Howard. His great-grandmother was born in West Africa before being captured and forced to live as a slave in Virginia. Boothe describes his grandfather as a “pure African.”[i]

He cherished memories of his grandfather offering songs of worship to God, his grandmother’s fervent prayers for those in need, and the Christian fellowship he experienced at a Baptist church, where “black and white people sat together to commune and wash each other’s feet.”[ii]

At the age of three, Boothe learned the alphabet on a tin-plate. By eight he was reading the Bible. Boothe’s ability to read and write was an anomaly. But in God’s providence—and despite the oppressive nature of slavery—he was enslaved on a plantation with many teachers. He writes in a brief autobiographical sketch,

The teachers who boarded here…became my instructors, and so I was soon reading and writing fairly well. Here, listening to the reading of the Bible, I was drawn toward it and began to read it for myself.

He goes on to speak of how the gospel story “bound” him to it “with cords,” which nothing, not even the hardship of slavery, could break.[iii]

Boothe’s ability to read and write saved him from being forced to endure the harsh labor of picking cotton in the sweltering heat. Instead, Boothe served as an “office boy” for an attorney, which allowed him to spend hours reading law books and the Bible (a primary source for legal practices in the mid-nineteenth century).

An Experience of Grace

Though Boothe had an affinity for the scriptures and professed “an experience of grace” that fixed him “on the side of the people of God,” he didn’t receive baptism until after gaining his freedom through the Emancipation Proclamation.[iv] In his work The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptist of Alabama, Boothe speaks of the transition from living as slaves to freemen and women, including the impact on life in the church. He writes,

The Negro was, by slavery, reduced to the minimum…He was not allowed to have any will of his own…His master’s will was substituted for his, and out of his master’s choice his words and deeds must proceed, even as concerned the most sacred relations of life…He was not allowed to have any conscience…Whatever the master said, the slave must do…

From this condition, we came forth into liberty, and with this eking existence of wilted life we must make a beginning as freemen…We had never felt or studied anything of the privileges and obligations which center in individual sovereignty. Though we were ignorant of the gospel for the most part and knew nothing of the order of business in church meetings, we found ourselves suddenly forced into the management of church affairs. We had now to look to our own heads for light, to our own hearts for courage, and to our own consciences for moral dictation.[v]

An Uplifting Legacy

Boothe would dedicate the next fifty years of his life to helping African Americans and their clergy navigate the waters of their newfound freedom. In 1868, he was ordained as a minister at St. Louis Street Church in Mobile. One year later he taught at the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was a U.S. government-funded agency that provided shelter, clothing, food, and education to help lift newly freed men and women up out of the pit of slavery.