Dressed in their Easter Sunday best, President Barack Obama and his family celebrated the occasion by attending a church founded by a group of freed slaves.
The first family entered Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington D.C. to a round of applause as members of a choir dressed in black sang Total Praise.
Obama shook a few hands and hugged some members of the congregation as he and his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, walked to a second-row pew.
According to the church’s pastor, Dr. Wallace Charles Smith, 21 freed slaves made it to the nation’s capital from Fredericksburg, Va., to establish a place where they could worship freely and where ‘they could reach others with the good news of their salvation.’
The church was founded in 1863.
Smith wrote last September, on the church’s 147th anniversary, that the group ‘could not see the way ahead … but went forth to a land they felt God had given them.’
Located about two miles north of the White House, Shiloh Baptist is one of the oldest African-American congregations in the city.
