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Virginia Theological Seminary and CollegeIn January 1910, at age twenty-six, Ota Benga moved to Lynchburg to attend Virginia Theological Seminary and College, a Black Baptist school located in Durmid, a suburb south of the city. Ever since the scandal at the zoo, and largely thanks to the advocacy of seminary president Gregory W. Hayes, Benga’s guardians had sought to send him to Lynchburg. They believed the seminary would give him the best chance to receive a formal education and convert to Christianity, and, in doing so, he would support their larger goal of proving that Africans did not possess inferior intelligence.
Baptist churches became popular among African Americans in the South in part because they offered more membership rights than other denominations. Until the nineteenth century, and unlike the more-elite Episcopal church, Baptist churches routinely offered free and enslaved blacks full membership, and sometimes roles like exhorter or deacon, in their congregations; they restricted leadership roles like elder and pastor to whites. Until 1831, blacks were also free to lead their own separate Baptist congregations, providing a level of autonomy for African American communities nonexistent in most other areas of southern society. After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, white Virginians become fearful that violence would result from assembling black communities, so the General Assembly passed laws restricting enslaved and free blacks from worshipping without white supervision.