Identified with this serious group was Richard DeBaptiste, who migrated with his free parents of color from Fredericksburg, Virginia, to the Northwest after the restrictions placed upon the Negroes of this class in Virginia became intolerable. His first important work was that of teaching a public school for colored youth in the Springfield township at Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, where he later organized and pastored a Baptist Church from 1860 to 1863. He then became pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, a charge which he held until 1882. Serving in this capacity, he purchased two building sites at a cost of $16,000 and built two brick church edifices costing respectively $15,000 and $18,000. [Illustration: REV. RICHARD DEBAPTISTE A preacher of the Word in Chicago.] His work as a minister, however, was in no sense local. He was elected corresponding secretary of the Wood River Association in 1864, was a prominent figure and officer in the Northwestern and Southern Baptist Convention organized in 1865, and was chosen president of the American Baptist Missionary Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, serving it consecutively for four years. He was thereafter elected president at intervals and remained a commanding figure in the convention because of his power and influence in the church. Manifesting further interest in the work of the denomination, he contributed to the church literature through the _Chicago Conservator_, the _Western Herald_, and the _National Monitor_. In fact, in his day he was not only the outstanding minister of his denomination in the West, but one of the most influential men of his race. One of the most prominent ministers of the Reconstruction period who were not deterred from their course by politics was Rufus L. Perry. Born a slave in Nashville, Tennessee, where because of the liberal attitude of the whites toward the Negroes, he, in spite of his condition, was permitted to attend a free school for Negroes, Perry had, even before the Civil War, laid a foundation upon which he well built thereafter. He escaped from slavery in 1852 and entered upon the study of theology at the Kalamazoo (Michigan) Seminary, graduating with the class of 1861, when he was ordained as pastor of the Baptist Church at Ann Arbor, Michigan. He later served as a pastor at St. Catherine's, Ontario, and at Buffalo and Brooklyn, New York. He had then convinced the world that he was "very logical, a clear reasoner, close and active debater, deep thinker, and excellent writer," "a man of splendid natural abilities," who "goes at once to the bottom of any subject that he undertakes." [Illustration: DR. RUFUS L. PERRY]