Our story
Five generations,
one congregation.
For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations. · Psalm 100:5
1891 · The founding
A church is planted
beside the rails.
Live Oak Missionary Baptist Church was founded on May 19, 1891, twenty-six years after Emancipation. It was the same year the new railroad gave Ailey its post office, and two years before the town itself was incorporated. The railroad made the town; faith made the community.
From the beginning, this church was an anchor of Black life in Montgomery County. The record reaches back through generations of Sunday gatherings, baptisms, weddings, and homegoings, and the congregation has met on Pine Street through all of it.
The fields of Ailey, where the congregation has gathered for more than one hundred thirty years.
1927 · The schoolhouse next door
A church that built
a school.
In 1927, the families of this congregation did something remarkable. Led by S.S. Mincey, a trustee of the school and a pillar of this community, they brought a Rosenwald school to Ailey, one of only about two hundred forty built across Georgia.
The fund’s own ledger card still exists. The school cost $3,650. Of that, the Black families of Ailey raised $850 themselves, in a time when that sum was a fortune, so their children could learn in a three-teacher schoolhouse on two acres beside the church.
That building stands today as Ailey’s community center. The church and the schoolhouse have shared this ground for nearly a century: faith and learning, side by side.
The Ailey School, newly built, 1928. Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Fisk University.
The record itself
The Ailey School’s card in the Rosenwald Fund ledger, 1927–28 budget year. The line that matters most reads “Negroes… $850.” Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Fisk University.
1900s · The generations
The gathering place
of a county.
As early as 1900, the county’s Black Baptist association chose Ailey for its annual meeting. In 1950, the Oconee Zion Association gathered at Live Oak itself. For generations, the newspapers of Savannah and Vidalia carried news of this congregation’s deacons, ushers, choirs, and homegoings.
The traditions the record shows are the ones we keep still: Women’s Day, summer Revival, Watch Night with breakfast as the new year comes in, and gospel music sung the way this county has always sung it.
This same little town raised Walker Smith Jr., born in Ailey on May 3, 1921, as his birth certificate records. The world came to know him as Sugar Ray Robinson. His childhood home still stands a short walk from this church.
Through the pines, 1928. Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, Fisk University.
1930 · The ground that holds them
The cemetery keeps
their names.
Behind the church lies Live Oak Cemetery, where more than five hundred of our people rest, reaching back to the founding generation.
Among them is S.S. Mincey, the man who brought Ailey its school. He was chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Party, twice a delegate to its national convention, and newly elected Grand Secretary of Georgia’s Black Masons. In the summer of 1930 he was taken from his home at night by masked men and beaten. He did not survive, and no one was ever brought to justice. He rests here, among the people he served.
No historical marker in this county yet tells his story. His church remembers, and through the Live Oak Legacy Project we are working to honor this ground and every name it keeps.
Live Oak Cemetery, behind the church. More than five hundred memorials.
Today · The story continues
The same work,
carried forward.
Today the congregation worships under the leadership of Pastor Dr. James C. Walker, who also shepherds Mt. Nebo Missionary Baptist Church in Tarrytown and is a sought-after voice in pulpits across this part of Georgia.
The children and grandchildren of this church now live in Atlanta, Jacksonville, Philadelphia, Detroit, and beyond. Wherever they are, this is still home, and the door is still open. Homecoming is not just a Sunday here. It is what this church has always done: call its people back to the ground that knows their names.
The church today, still standing where it was planted.
Help us keep the story
This history belongs to the families of Live Oak. If your people worshiped here, taught at the Ailey School, or rest in the cemetery, we want your photographs, your programs, and your memories.
Share your family’s story