A Publishing House Dispute and the Name It Left Behind

The National Baptist Convention USA Incorporated did not begin as an incorporated body, and its own name records the legal fight that made it one. In September 1895, delegates gathered at Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta to merge three existing Black Baptist organizations, the Foreign Mission Baptist Convention, the American National Baptist Convention and the Baptist National Education Convention, into a single National Baptist Convention under president Elias Camp Morris. For two decades it functioned as one body, and under Morris's leadership it built the National Baptist Publishing House in Nashville into the largest Black owned publishing enterprise in the country.

That publishing success became the Convention's breaking point. Richard H. Boyd, who ran the Publishing Board, argued it should operate as an independent entity outside the Convention's financial oversight; Morris and the Convention's other leaders insisted the Board belonged to the whole body. Neither side backed down, and in 1915 Boyd's faction withdrew to form the National Baptist Convention of America, taking the unincorporated name with it. The body that remained under Morris incorporated under state law specifically so that its claim to the disputed publishing assets, and to everything else the Convention held, would rest on clear legal title rather than convention custom. The new legal identity gave the body its present name: the National Baptist Convention, USA, Incorporated. Court battles over the Publishing House itself continued until both Morris and Boyd died in 1921 within months of each other.