The churches of Harlem have long served as essential institutions in the neighborhood, shaping not only the spiritual lives of residents, but also the bonds that strengthen community. Many great churches, including Mother A.M.E. Zion Church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and St. James Presbyterian Church established their present-day homes in Upper Manhattan in the 1920s. Yet all three can trace their origins back to Greenwich Village in the 19th century, and to the fight for abolition in our nation.
Mother A.M.E. Zion Church
The Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church at 140-148 West 137th Street is the sixth home for New York City’s first Black church, and the founding church of the A.M.E. Zion Conference of churches. Today, Mother Zion’s bold neo-Gothic structure stands as a symbol of the city’s Black, religious, and civil rights history, while continuing to serve as a touchstone for more than 1 million followers.
Mother Zion was a groundbreaking church in every sense of the word. In the early 1920s, while the church was located at 151 West 136th Street, leaders purchased three adjacent buildings on West 137th Street, demolishing them to make way for a new structure — a first for Harlem, where congregations new to the community at the time would typically purchase buildings formerly used by white congregations. Mother Zion also hired architect George W. Foster Jr., one of the first Black architects registered in the nation and one of only 59 Black architects recorded in the 1910 United States Census. The building was completed in 1925, and the institution became a key player in the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement.
Mother A.M.E. Zion Church was founded in 1796, when Black members of the John Street Methodist Church facing ongoing discrimination decided to form a separate church. After serving the Lower Manhattan community from several sites for decades, by 1864 the move was made to Greenwich Village, the center of African American life and home to its “Little Africa” neighborhood, then the largest Black community in New York City and the center of Black life in the city. The church relocated to a former Dutch Reform Church at the northeast corner of West 10th Street and Bleecker Street, and became a grand depot for the Underground Railroad. Abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Bomfree, was a member of the congregation. Mother Zion stayed at this location until 1904, when it followed its congregation’s members moving uptown.
Abyssinian Baptist Church
Located just a block away from Mother Zion, at 136-142 West 138th Street, the Abyssinian Baptist Church is the second oldest African-American congregation in Manhattan, and has long been a center of civil rights and social justice activism.
Opening in 1923 during the early years of the Harlem Renaissance and the significant growth it brought for the Black community in Harlem, the church soon had to face the effects of the Depression on its neighbors. Abyssinian became an important resource for its congregation and for the larger Harlem community. Led by Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his son Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the church organized a People’s Committee to help find employment, an employment bureau, a free food kitchen, and an adult education school. (Reverend Powell Jr. also served 11 terms in the House of Representatives, the first Black congressman from New York or anywhere in the northeastern United States.) Successors Reverend Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Reverend Calvin Butts broadened the church’s legacy for the surrounding neighborhood through the Abyssinian Development Corporation, as well as AIDS awareness programs and services, Alcoholics Anonymous, after-school, Africare, senior support, and many other programs.
Like Mother Zion, Abysinnian was formed in Lower Manhattan as the result of discrimination within an existing church, as it separated from the First Baptist Church in 1808 to become only the second Black church in the city. Some of its founders were natives of Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia, and the congregation highlighted its African heritage and the antiquity of Christian traditions in Abyssinia.
In 1856, Abyssinian moved closer to Little Africa in Greenwich Village, purchasing 166 Waverly Place for $4,000. While here, the congregation grew into one of the city’s wealthiest African-American congregations, by 1900 claiming more than 1,000 members. Its choir was admired as one of the best in the city, and the church contributed to a number of charitable activities, including support of its “indigent” members and contributions to city missions. The migration of the Black community to Harlem around the dawn of the 20th century was the impetus for the church to move further uptown, leaving its Village home in 1903. The two buildings that stand on the site today, 160-162 and 164-166 Waverly Place, were built in 1905 and 1907, around the time many traces of Little Africa disappeared from the area.
St. James Presbyterian Church
With a commanding presence on the incline of a hill overlooking Harlem, the highly visible neo-Gothic structure at 409 West 141st Street has housed the St. James Presbyterian Church since 1927. The building with its impressive bell tower, completed in 1904 as the Lenox Presbyterian Church, has since provided a number of community, outreach, and choral initiatives including the Harlem School of the Arts, founded by Dorothy Maynor, an acclaimed operatic soprano who was barred from a career in opera because of her race.
St. James’ origins as the first African American Presbyterian Church in the city can be traced back to the Shiloh Presbyterian Church, founded on Rose Street in Lower Manhattan in 1822 as the First Colored Presbyterian Church. The church’s founder was Samuel Cornish, who also established America’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. From the church’s inception, Shiloh was part of the Underground Railroad. From 1859 through 1865 and 1873 to 1882, the church was led by Henry Highland Garnet, a fugitive slave who lived at various locations in the Village, including 183 and 185 Bleecker Street, 102 West 3rd Street, and 175 MacDougal Street. Under his leadership, the church continued its fight against slavery: calling for boycotts of slave products such as sugar, cotton, and rice; and aiding African American victims of the deadly 1863 Draft Riots and those seeking to escape attack. In 1875, the church moved to 140 Sixth Avenue (present-day 450 Sixth Avenue) and was located there until 1879.
In 1895, members of the former Shiloh Presbyterian Church organized St. James, moving to Harlem in 1927.
Read more about these and other historic churches with strong connections to Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo on our Beyond the Village and Back map for Upper Manhattan and the other boroughs (we also have a similar map for Manhattan Below 72nd Street), as well as in our Beyond the Village and Back blog series. You can also explore the civil rights histories of these and other institutions on our Civil Rights and Social Justice Map.
