African Meeting House , meeting house built in 1806 and located at 46 Joy Street in Boston , Massachusetts, USA, is the oldest standing Church for African American in the United States . It was one of four separate churches, two of which (including the African Meeting House) were Baptist and two were African Methodists - founded between 1805 and 1848 in Boston. These churches were formed because African Americans attending Euro-American churches were generally not allowed to sit in the nave with white congregants or vote in those churches.
origins
Around the turn of the 19th century, a black preacher from New Hampshire named Thomas Paul founded and led a congregation of the African Baptist Church. The first meetings took place in Faneuil Hall - Boston's public meeting hall where Patriots of the American Revolution held their meetings. There is a surviving account of a baptism of "nine negroes" on May 26, 1805, at which Paul and his brother Benjamin led the parishioners to the water, preached a sermon, prayers spoke and sang while a large crowd looked on.
In 1805, Paul's congregation bought land in the West End from Boston, where most of the city's blacks lived (a neighborhood now known as the North Slope of Beacon Hill ). A new $77,000 brick building was built with funds from blacks and whites, with construction almost exclusively being done by blacks. The building had three floors, was 12 × 15 meters, and contained 72 pews. The church was consecrated on December 6, 1806 and Paul was installed as pastor. He remained in this post until 1829.
Because two motions - one (1787) to the Massachusetts legislature and the other (1798) to the City of Boston - had been turned down to separate schools for blacks (they had "received no benefit from the free schools"), the new church (known as the African Meeting House) also served for a time as a school for Bostons African American children. The classroom was set up in the church's basement sacristy.
The school that met there was the privately funded African school. It was originally in a house on the corner of George and May streets in the black community organized , but it wasn't very successful until it moved to the African meeting house. The school remained in the meeting house until 1835 when it moved to a new building and became Smith Elementary and High School . Owned by the city, the school had an endowment of Abiel Smith, a wealthy Boston businessman who was an early advocate of black youth education.
The Black Faneuil Hall
The African meeting house served more than just a place of worship and school. The abolitionist publisher William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society on January 6, 1832 at the Meeting House. As was Faneuil Hall for the meetings held there in protest against British tyranny before the revolution described as "the cradle of freedom" , the African The meeting house was closed because of the meetings held there in protest against the slavery Called Black Faneuil Hall . The The 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry , the first black regiment of the American Civil War , was recruited there in 1863 by an African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass .
The African Meeting House also served as a focal point for Boston's black community. As historian George Levesque noted,
Late 19th century to present
By the late 19th century, Boston's African American community had moved from the West End to the South End and Roxbury, and that African Meeting House was sold to a Jewish community who named it Synagogue used . In 1905, on Garrison's 100th birthday, a memorial service was held for him in the building.
The original church records for the African Meeting House were destroyed by fire in the early 1900s. Nonetheless, the Museum of African American History acquired the building in 1972 and subsequently restored it in 1855. Today, the African Meeting House is a ward of the museum Black Heritage Trail, a walking tour of Boston highlighting the history of the city's African American community. along with the The Abiel Smith School , the African Meeting House, was declared a National Historic Site in 1974.