John William Black
Early Kentucky Baptist Pastor & Leader
By George R. JewellJohn William Black was born in Rowan County, Kentucky on December 13, 1875; died at Covington, Kentucky on May 15, 1950.
Attorney, pastor, Kentucky Baptist leader. After attending Newfoundland Normal, a private school, Black taught school in the mountains of Kentucky, became an attorney, and was elected county attorney for Rowan County.
On January 3, 1896, he married Jennie L. Adkins, by whom he had two daughters and nine sons. In 1916, while county attorney, Black decided to enter the ministry and began preaching at Howard's Mill, near Morehead and Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, about May 1 of that year.
He was ordained on June 1, 1916. Although Black attended Southern Baptist Theological Seminary only a few months, he remained throughout life an avid reader and a student of the Bible.
A logical thinker and a pleasing pulpit speaker, he held pastorater in Levee, Jackson, Wheatley, and Dry Ridge, Kentucky. During his 13-year pastorate at Latonia Baptist Church, Covington, Kentucky, which began on May 1, 1926, he became recognized as one of the leading pastors of the state.
Black was clerk of Three Forks Association and moderator of Concord Association, a member of the executive board of the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky and of its approprations committee for seven-year periods, moderator of the general association, and its general secretary-treasurer from 1939 to 1945.
====================== [From Leo T. Crisman, editor, The Kentucky Baptist Newsletter of the Kentucky Baptist Historical Society, volume I, No. 1, January 15, 1971; via Southern Baptist Seminary Archives, Adam Winters, Archivist, Internet edition. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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