Callam Blog

Robert Graham

A Forgotten Leader

                                              Old Yallahs Baptist Church Building

Robert Graham was a member of George Liele’s church on what was Windward Road. During Liele’s visit to England, English missionary Joshua Tinson served as interim pastor at Liele’s church. When Liele returned to Jamaica, Graham was one of the members who joined Tinson to form what is now called Hanover Street Baptist Church, where he was made a deacon.

Tinson had much respect for Graham, whom he regarded as a man of much ability and enterprise. Tinson desired to teach him English grammar and pronunciation, but Graham would have none of it. Graham claimed that Tinson’s method of speaking was appropriate for communicating in England and he insisted that his way of pronouncing words was more appropriate and effective when communicating with Jamaicans.

In 1845, Graham was ordained to the ministry and he went to work among the Baptists in Yallahs, where Tinson had been offering pastoral assistance. Graham relieved Tinson of the responsibility for the pastorate at Yallahs Baptist Church.

In 1855, Graham gathered several persons who had just left the East Queen Street Baptist Church and, for a brief period, he served as their pastor. He was the person who administered the baptism of the famous orator, Samuel Ringgold Ward, an African American from the province of Maryland, who had escaped from enslavement and became a labour leader who campaigned for abolition of enslavement in America. Drawing on the success of his book, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: his anti-slavery labours in the United States, Canada and England, Ward retired in Jamaica, where he died in 1866, after serving as a Congregational minister and farmer for eleven months. The great Frederick Douglass once said of Ward, “As an orator and thinker, he was vastly superior to any of us” and “the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of race.”

An influential person, Graham was one of the directors of the Jamaica Mutual Life Assurance Society. He maintained a connection with Coke’s Chapel, i.e. Coke Methodist Church. He also enjoyed a good relationship with the wife of the Honourable Robert Osborne (1800 - 1878). Osborne was the son of a white Jamaican whose father was Scottish and whose mother was Black. Osborn’s father was a member of the House of Assembly, and in 1798, speaker of the House.  Osborn himself was co-editor with Edward Jordan, of The Watchmen newspaper and the co-editors used this medium to campaign for equal rights for free coloured people in Jamaica. After the emancipation of enslaved people in Jamaica, Osborne and Jordan changed the name of their newspaper to The Morning Journal. In later years, Osborn, like his father before him, served in the House of Assembly and famously predicted that “in the years to come, which none of us can live to see, the government of the colonies will fall into the hands of the blacks.”

Osborne’s co-editor of The Morning Journal, Edward Jordan, was born to parents of different backgrounds. His father was a white man from Barbados and his mother a black woman named Grace from Jamaica. Jordan was arrested and spent seven months in jail for advocating for the protestors who were being treated with brutality after the Baptist War in 1831.  Eventually, the courts freed Jordan of the charge of sedition.

In 1859, Graham passed away and Rev Edwin Palmer of the Hanover Street Baptist Church, assumed pastoral leadership at the Yallahs Baptist Church. If only more was popularly known about Graham’s ministry