The Southern Baptist Convention does not describe its own founding as an accident of geography. It was organized in May 1845 at First Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, after the American Baptist Home Mission Society, then the cooperative body funding Baptist missionaries nationwide, refused to commission a missionary who owned enslaved people. Rather than accept a mission board that would not appoint slaveholders, Baptist delegates from the southern states withdrew and formed their own convention explicitly to continue supporting missionaries who held enslaved people as property.
For 150 years the Convention's own official histories treated this founding largely as a matter of regional organization. That changed in 1995, when delegates meeting for the Convention's sesquicentennial adopted a formal Resolution on Racial Reconciliation, stating plainly that Southern Baptists had failed, in many cases, to support, and had often opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African Americans, and repenting of racism in all its forms. The resolution named the 1845 founding itself, over the refusal to commission a slaveholding missionary, as the origin the Convention was asking forgiveness for.
The Southern Baptist Convention is today the largest Protestant denomination in the United States by membership, its early defense of slavery long since repudiated in its own official record even as the Convention it produced has grown into a body many times the size of the mission societies it once broke from.