
The Seventh-day Adventist Church was officially founded on May 21, 1863, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Its charter members were mostly whites from states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Given its fledgling nature and the northern culture and worldview of its members, it was not until roughly a decade after the Civil War that the church established a substantial and permanent presence in the Deep South. Adventists' methods of evangelism in the late-nineteenth-century South, such as they were, consisted of selling and distributing Adventist literature, holding gospel meetings in halls and tents, one-on-one and group Bible studies, discussing their faith with neighbors and friends, and providing education to recently emancipated blacks.
The progenitor of Seventh-day Adventists in Alabama was a white man named Jesse Morgan Elliott, a native of Bladon Springs, Choctaw County, who fought for the Union Army. Elliott became an Adventist while hospitalized from war injuries—he was blinded in battle—upon his discharge in 1866 he returned to his hometown, where he formed a small church. He was ordained to the ministry in 1880. Much later in 1894, a black Adventist presence was established in three Alabama cities. In Selma, Dallas County, Mississippian Tazwell B. Buckner sold Adventist literature and convinced several Baptist couples to become Adventists. Charles M. Kinney, the first African American to be ordained an Adventist minister, converted a number of blacks in Huntsville. In Birmingham, Jefferson County, Jim Pearson operated a medical practice for sick and destitute blacks in the city and organized a congregation.
Perhaps the most important development for Adventism in Alabama was the founding of Oakwood University in Huntsville. In January 1896, the denomination purchased a 360-acre former plantation for the purpose of establishing a school for the church's black members. At the time, the total number of black Adventists in the entire church was only between 100-200, but greater efforts were being made by the church to evangelize blacks in the South. Many of these efforts centered around education. The purchase of the Oakwood property, then, was considered an act of faith by church leaders, that the black membership would grow and attend the school. On November 16, 1896, Oakwood opened with 16 students. From that modest beginning, in a matter of decades Oakwood would become a center of education for the church's black members, training hundreds of ministers, musicians, educators, politicians, physicians, and other professionals. In 1932, its first black president, James L. Moran, was appointed; in 1958 it became a fully accredited college; and in 2008 Oakwood obtained university status. Throughout its existence, some of Adventism's most distinguished figures have studied and taught at Oakwood, and today the church's sole Historically Black College and University is an internationally recognized educational institution.


Seventh-day Adventists have one of the most elaborate governing systems among Christian denominations, and Alabama was no exception. In 1901, the church organized the Alabama Conference to direct its efforts in the state as well as in seven of Florida's northern counties, with a membership of about 300. That same year, the Southern Union Conference was organized to coordinate five contiguous conferences, including the Alabama Conference. In 1932, Mississippi was added to the Alabama Conference to form the Alabama-Mississippi Conference, with just over 2,000 members. From 1944-1946, the Adventist Church formed regional conferences, or black-administered governing units, to direct the church's efforts among blacks, owing to an unwillingness on the part of whites to integrate with blacks. At that point the black membership of Alabama came under the South-Central Conference, where it remains to the present. This race-based conference system mirrored the demographic separation of the local churches in Alabama, as it still does in many respects.
In 1975, the headquarters of the Alabama-Mississippi Conference was relocated from Meridian, Mississippi, to Montgomery. Nine years later in 1984 the Alabama-Mississippi Conference was renamed Gulf States Conference—adopting nomenclature that included the Florida counties—with a membership of 6,553. In 2003 the Office for Regional Conference Ministry, the headquarters of the nine regional conferences, opened on the campus of Oakwood University.

Additional Resources
Baker, Delbert W., ed. Telling the Story: An Anthology on the Development of the Black SDA Work. Loma Linda, Calif.: Loma Linda University Printing Services, 1996
Hansen, Louis A. From So Small A Dream. Nashville, Tenn.: Southern Publishing Association, 1968.
London, Jr., Samuel G. Seventh-day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Warren, Mervyn A. Oakwood! A Vision Splendid Continues, 1896-2010. Collegedale, Tenn.: College Press, 2010.