5th Temple Guard: Reverend Daddy Sam Sharpe

Guardian of A Temple Gate:

The Right Honourable Deacon. Daddy Sam Sharpe

Samuel Sharpe was born in the year 1801 and ascended on 23rd May 1832), he also known as Daddy Sam Sharpe.  Sharpe was an enslaved African Jamaican man who was the leader of the widespread 1832 Baptist War slave insurrection (also known as the Christmas Rebellion) in Jamaica.

Sharpe became a well-known preacher and leader in the Baptist Church, he was a deacon at the Burchell Baptist Church in Montego Bay. Sharpe spent most of his time travelling across Jamaica, preaching Christianity, which he believed promised freedom.
Sharpe organised a peaceful general strike across many estates in western Jamaica to protest working conditions. However violent reprisals by the plantation owners, led to armed resistance.  Sharpe's originally peaceful protest turned into Jamaica's largest slave insurrection and uprising, known to history as The Baptist War. The uprising lasted for only 10 days and spread throughout the entire island, mobilizing as many as 60,000 of Jamaica's enslaved African population.

Leading up to his execution, while in jail, Sharpe had several meetings with Rev. Henry Bleby, a missionary, who reported that Sharpe told him:

"I would rather go out and die on that gallows, than live a slave"

He was proclaimed a National Hero of Jamaica in 1975.

The Credentials and Significance:

He bore his Cross, for Christ and suffered the same fate.  He was his Brothers Keeper and was a Mini-Star and Good Shepherd who demonstrated the greatest love, as he laid down his life for the sheep and his Brethrin.
Like his fellow Jamaican, icon Paul Bogel, who came later, he was also a Baptist preacher, influenced specifically by the Ethiopianism Christian movement that was sweeping the Black world at the time.  Samuel actually took his surname, from George Lisle, or George Sharpe as he is also known, as he was a Pastor of the same Baptist Congregation in Jamaica that George himself had founded in 1782.