John Jasper Grave

“I have finished my work, I am waiting at the River, looking across for further orders.”

So ended the life of one of America’s most notable African-American preachers. In fact, one biographer called John Jasper “the most famous of all the slave preachers.” (Dance, “Jasper, John.”, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, 2006), while another entitled his biography “The Unmatched Negro Philosopher and Preacher” (William Hatcher, 1908):

“These pages deal with a negro, and are not designed either to help or to hurt the negro race. They have only to do with one man. He was one of a class,–without pedigree, and really without successors, except that he was so dominant and infectious that numbers of people affected his ways and dreamed that they were one of his sort. As a fact, they were simply of another and of a baser sort.” (Hatcher, Introduction)

Hatcher would write later in his biography that John was a “God-made preacher who was great in his bondage and became immortal in his freedom.” (Hatcher, pg. 15)

John Jasper met his beloved Savior on March 28, 1901, after over 70 years of preaching the Gospel! He was such a treasured member of the community that the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a front-page announcement of his death saying Jasper was “a man of deep convictions, a man with a purpose in life, a man who earnestly desired to save souls for heaven.” May his tribe increase!

From the Christian Hall of Fame:

John Jasper
1812 – 1901

John Jasper was born a slave, the last of twenty-four children. He grew up on a plantation where he labored in the fields until he reached adulthood. One day in 1839, while working in a tobacco factory he was converted to Christ. Immediately sensing a Divine call to the ministry, he began to tell everyone of his salvation.

He preached for sixty years, twenty-five of them as a slave. After the Civil War, he started a church on an island on the James River in Richmond, Virginia. The congregation grew to thousands before his death. Legislators, judges, governors, and many men of distinction went to hear him preach.

He preached the fundamental doctrines of the faith with unsurpassed ardor. Jasper believed the Bible to be the source of all authority, and he preached it in nearly every county and city in Virginia and often beyond. He was sought after continually, and in that respect he stood unmatched by any man of his race. His moral and religious ideals were very lofty, and he lived up to them to a degree not true of many men.

Many of the most distinguished white ministers of the country went to hear him preach when they were in Richmond. John Jasper was called the most original, masterful, and powerful Negro preacher that this country has ever produced.