Caesar Blackwell

Caesar Blackwell (1769–1845) was an enslaved African-American preacher in Alabama, one of several black preachers in the Southern United States who preached to a mixed congregation. Others disagree: Wayne Flint, in his Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie, says that the Antioch congregation tried to buy him his freedom in 1828 but was unsuccessful, and that in the end he was bought by the Alabama Baptist Association, and became a preaching assistant to one of its ministers, the aforementioned James McLemore, who already enslaved Blackwell's wife and child. Flynt's account is cited by others, including Gary Burton (pastor of Pintlala Baptist Church, Hope Hull, Alabama).

His calling What most sources agree on is that Blackwell "was commissioned to preach and baptize converts in the slave community" and that his price was $625. He preached to both black and white people. According to Wilson Fallin and Wayne Flint, Blackwell had an excellent command of Calvinist theology and was praised by antebellum whites

Blackwell, though enslaved still (according to Wayne Flint and Wilson Fallin), was allowed to keep the income he generated through preaching until the 1830s. In 1832, a shift in attitudes among the white population following slave insurrections in various Southern states led to severe restrictions on the educational opportunities and legal status of enslaved people. In 1835, the state Baptist convention in Alabama condemned Northern abolitionism. After 1835, he was allowed only to keep his expenses, and his preaching activities were curtailed; and by 1844 Blackwell was in poor health, though he continued to baptize large numbers of converts, leading them "singing...through the streets of Montgomery on their way to the creek to be baptized". (where McLemore is buried as well), in the "posh neighborhood" of Greystone—but just outside the enclosed area of the cemetery.