Peter Randolph

Rev. Peter Randolph (August 7, 1897) was an African-American minister and abolitionist. Born into slavery in Virginia, he was freed in the will of his owner but this request took three years and legal proceedings to be honored. Randolph moved to Boston after being freed, where he became a pastor. He spent four years in Richmond, Virginia, after the end of the Civil War, before moving back to Boston. Randolph published an autobiographical account of his life that went through several editions.

Biography Peter Randolph was born in Prince George County, Virginia, on the Brandon Plantation. He was enslaved upon birth and owned by Carter H. Edloe, who also held his mother and four or five siblings in bondage. Randolph's father was enslaved on a nearby plantation, Sixty-six former slaves sailed for Boston on September 5, 1847. They arrived ten days later. The work was promoted in The Boston Transcript by its editor Daniel Haskill, and a second edition was published that year. Its second edition, at eighty-two pages, was substantially longer.

Randolph's request to serve as a chaplain in the Union Army during the American Civil War was rejected because there were no open spots. About a month after the end of the war in 1865 he traveled to Virginia, first settling in City Point, Virginia, and later moving to Richmond, Virginia, where he was preacher of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. As the church's first African-American pastor, Randolph instituted several reforms including giving women a greater role. Randolph moved back to Boston after four years, founding the Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1871 to provide a space for African-Americans who had moved to Boston from the Southern United States to worship. Randolph published From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit. The Autobiography of Rev. Peter Randolph: the Southern Question Illustrated and Sketches of Slave Life, in 1893, a third edition of his earlier publication that was well over twice as long, with 220 pages. He worked at several churches around the Northeast during this time.

Randolph died on August 7, 1897, in Boston. An obituary published in The Boston Journal described him as holding "the record of founding and preaching over more Baptist churches than any other Baptist clergyman in New England."

Legacy According to an editor of a republication of From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit, Randolph's works have been "generally ignored by historians of slavery". They were analyzed in a 2003 article published in Religion & Literature.