Before the Negro Methodists perfected their organizations by which the influence of their churches might be permanently extended throughout the country, the Baptists had been locally trying to do the same thing. The Harrison Street Baptist Church was organized at Petersburg, Virginia, in 1776; another Negro Baptist Church at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1785; the First African Baptist Church at Savannah in 1785, with a second Baptist Church in that city following fourteen years later; the African Baptist Church of Lexington, Kentucky, in 1790; and a mixed Baptist Church in the Mound Bayou, Mississippi district, in 1805, by Joseph Willis, a free Negro born in South Carolina in 1762.[5] In the city of Philadelphia on May 14, 1809, thirteen colored members who had for some time felt that it would be more congenial for them to worship separately, were dismissed to form the first African Baptist Church. On June 19, 1809, the use of the First Baptist Church (white) was given them for the meeting at which they were constituted an organized body. The main trouble with the First Baptist Church (white) seemed to be that it had suffered from having its anti-slavery ardor dampened during the reaction following the Revolutionary War. Whereas many of the Baptists in other parts had become radical emancipationists, the white Baptists of Philadelphia after having attacked the slave trade, tried to dodge the anti-slavery issue with the excuse that it was a political question with which the church had nothing to do. The anti-slavery sentiment was naturally suppressed during the pastorates of Holcombe, Brantly and Cuthbert, all southern men, partly in defense of their well-known sentiment and partly through the sentiment of the people themselves. Complete separation of the Negro Baptists in this church was, therefore, deemed a necessity during the first quarter of the nineteenth century when there was an increasing prejudice against free persons of color because of the rapid migration of freedmen from the South to Pennsylvania.