Harlem Congregants Visit Ancestral Worth Street Home

POSTED DECEMBER 1, 2007

Forty Worth Street, the site of mammoth city departments like Transportation and Enviornmental Protection, is an unlikely stop for a busload of tourists. But for the 40 congregants of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church who disembarked there on a chilly Saturday morning last month, it is a place of history that they hold dear.

“As we stand here where our church once stood and praise you for all you have done for us though the years, we continue to ask you for your blessings…” the Rev.Violet Dease prayed as the group stood solemnly, heads bowed in front of the city-run building.

Here stood the first Abysinnian Baptist Church, one of the city’s oldest and most prominent African American institutions, now located in Harlem.

In 1811, 16 years before slavery was legally abolished in the city, a group of congregants, most of Ethiopian (Abyssinian) descent bought a small wooden building on the site. According to church history that the Rev. Dease read to her congregants that morning, these members, many of whom were educated and well-off merchants, had been attending the white-run First Baptist Church on Gold Street and were likely tired of second-class treatment. (They disdained, for example, being ushered into segregated pews with obstructed views of the service.)

The Ethiopians and other African American congregants split from the church in 1808. With the help of a Boston abolitionist, Rev. Thomas Paul and the city’s Ethiopian merchants, the small group organized themselves and three years later bought the Worth Street (then Anthony Street) church, owned by a dwindling white congregation, and called it the Abyssinian Baptist Church. It was the first black Baptist Church in the state and the fifth in the country.

Persistent financial problems forced the congregation to sell the building, for $12,000, in 1854. For the next 10 years they took whatever temporary spaces they could find in Lower Manhattan before settling in a  building on Waverly Place, the second of four locations in the church’s 200-year history.

To commemorate that first home, at the corner of Worth and Church Streets, the congregation plans to place a plaque on the building next year.

“There are so many occasions where people deny us our place in American history,” said Kevin McGruder, president of the church’s Archives and History Ministry. “And it’s important for our members to understand that our presence follows the history of this country.”

[Home][Back][Search] [Advertise][Contact]
The Tribeca Trib · 401 Broadway, 5th Floor · New York, NY · 10013 · 212.219.9709