E. W. Perry and the Southern Baptist Convention, Part 1
A guest post by Luke Holmes
Dr. E. W. Perry, Photo from Gateway to OK History
It would be understandable if E.W. Perry was nervous as silence fell over the hushed crowd. He had stood before large congregations of all sizes for most of his life. But never before had someone like him stood before a group like this. The seasoned preacher did what he had done thousands of times by that point in his life: He opened his Bible and began to expound God’s word. Over the next hour, those attending the predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Oklahoma City in 1949 sat spellbound as he poured out the Gospel from his heart.
Never before had a Black man preached before the convention founded in order that slaveholders could be appointed as missionaries. By this time, Perry had already been the pastor at the legendary Tabernacle Baptist Church in Oklahoma City for 34 years. His message burned through him as he preached. One viewer recounted it this way.
He took his text from Philippians 3:10-11. In sublime eloquence and style he talked about the matchless glories of Christ. He called his hearers to renewed dedication to the all-important task of being good witnesses to the resurrection power of Jesus. He pointed out how every soul wants to live forever. He said, "The hope of this immortality is like a beacon light shining through the mists of the future. It ever urges the soul onward and upward. It is the greatest boon on earth. Without it, how dark is life and how terrible the grave. Take away this hope and you rob the soul of its strongest support, you break the courage of the bravest hearts and mar the comforts of the best of men.
Mississippi beginnings
The third of eleven children was born to Jack and Mary Jane Perry in a log cabin, thirteen miles east of Noxubee, Mississippi on May 14, 1882. They gave him the name Ezel Willie, with the name “Ezel” coming from the word for stone in 1 Samuel 20:19. He was born to a life of poverty, work, and very little education on a family farm. School was available 3 months out of the year, and there was much to do on the farm. He regularly drew water from the well and helped to tend the crops of corn, cotton, potatoes, and cane the family raised. Even with all that work, the children would often leave the table hungry. Very little is recorded about his life and upbringing at that time, but anyone who grew up Black in Mississippi at that time undoubtedly faced great struggles and hardships. They lived on land given to his grandparents after their emancipation. Grandfather Perry lived with them and could neither read nor write, and had taken their last name from a white man in their native state of Georgia. Perry noted once that “Our land was poor, we were poor, and all our neighbors were poor." Perry was not shielded from the past, and the adults in his life spoke often of the cruel whippings they received as slaves, or told stories of how Blacks were often chased by dogs just for entertainment. Those memories and so much more might have been in his mind as he addressed the convention crowd that Saturday morning decades later.
In spite of the hardships he faced, there is no doubt God was working in his life, and he came to Christ at an early age in a family that valued the Church. Perry had a dream where a man appeared to him in a white robe and called him to follow him, and so in his dream, the ten year old Perry got up and followed him. After a long journey, they came to water where he followed the man down to the water and was baptized. Upon coming out of the water, the man disappeared, just like in the story of Phillip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Soon after the dream, on the third Sunday of September in 1892, Perry was saved during a revival at the Belmont Baptist Church near Shuqulak, Mississippi.
Baptized and called
While picking cotton the next day, Perry began thinking more about the dream, the church, and the revival at church, and went to tell his mother what had happened. She dropped her dish rag on the floor and asked him, “What kind of man did you see? He thought for a moment before responding, “He was Black,” as to him there were only two types of men. His mother told him that might have been the devil he saw, but as Perry reflected more the man in his dream had no color at all. But when he went to church that night to share his testimony, he said the man was white, and that was persuasive enough to everyone there. The next week he was baptized with thirty-four others in Scott’s Pool, one mile from the church.
By August 1906 Perry found himself a farmer in Mississippi, a deacon in the church, and a husband of three years. The Belmont Church still had only quarter-time preaching in the church, with the deacons filling the pulpit the rest of the time. On one of those three Sundays a month without a Pastor, a discipline case came up that involved a cousin, and the serious nature of the case led to a disturbance in the church that almost resulted in a fist fight right there in the church. Perry recounted running out of the church house being chased by another man, before returning to church where the discipline service lasted until almost midnight. Perry must have shown something in that service, because as he walked home with an old deacon by the name of George Cobbs, Cobbs told him “Ezel, you are going to preach, and you are going to be called far, far, away from here." Perry had the urge to preach by the next January but fought the call for months. But by the one year anniversary of Cobbs prediction, Perry had surrendered to preach. He preached a few times in his home state before heading west from home to Ardmore, OK, where his uncle served as a pastor.
Read the rest of E. W. Perry's story in Part 2. Luke Holmes is the pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Duncan, OK. Read more of his articles on his website and discover more stories of forgotten Christians in his book The Forgotten Faithful.
Listen to more stories of often-forgotten Christians of history in our podcast Forgotten by Ronnie Brown.