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First African Baptist Church

Photo: Michael Rivera / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

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First African Baptist Church

Savannah, GA · Savannah

About

Tracing its congregation to 1773, this brick sanctuary on Franklin Square was raised in 1859 by enslaved and free Black members who made the bricks by hand and laid them after their days in the fields. Look down on the lower-level floor and you find holes drilled in a Kongo diamond pattern, breathing air to freedom seekers hidden in the crawlspace beneath the pews. The balcony pews still carry marks read as West African script, and a guided tour walks you through the full weight of that history.

Highlights

Getting there

23 Montgomery Street, Savannah, GA 31401

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Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.