The National Baptist Convention of America descends from the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, organized by Black Baptist state conventions meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880 to fund missionary work in Africa outside the control of white mission boards. In 1895, that body merged with two sister conventions, the American National Baptist Convention and the Baptist National Educational Convention, to form the National Baptist Convention, which quickly became the largest Black religious organization in the United States, encompassing missions, education, and publishing under one roof.
The convention's publishing arm, the National Baptist Publishing Board, was built into a major enterprise by its director, Richard Henry Boyd (1843-1922), who argued that he had founded and financed the Board largely with his own resources and that it belonged to him rather than to the convention as a corporate body. The dispute came to a head in 1915: the convention's majority voted to incorporate as the National Baptist Convention, USA, Incorporated, placing convention assets, including the Publishing Board, under corporate control, while Boyd and his allies rejected incorporation and continued as an unincorporated body retaining the Publishing Board, which took the name National Baptist Convention of America. The split remains the founding schism of both of today's largest historically Black Baptist conventions.