The Other SIDE Preservation Tale of a

In contrast to other preservation efforts spearheaded by Black Bostonians that focused on the vestiges of the city’s antislavery movement, the members of Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church drew motivation from owning a building with a past of proslavery sympathies and segregation. Putting an ironic twist on their building's troubled history by using it to pursue civil rights activism gave the AME congregation a resonant way to mark its growth in prosperity and prestige in the final decades of the nineteenth century. By the time a proposed street widening project threatened the church building in 1919, the congregation saw its own success story imbued in the structure’s walls, and its members had added motivation to fight to save the church where they had worshipped for almost half a century. Nowadays,

Charles Street Meeting House is counted among Beacon Hill’s key sites of antebellum antislavery activism, a fabricated past written into history in Old-Time New England, the scholarly journal predecessor to this magazine, in 1940. How did this come to be, and what were the implications?

In 1919, Boston’s street commissioners authorized the widening of Charles Street. In response, a committee of white Beacon Hill residents drafted their proposal to save “one of the most picturesque and characteristic features of the neighborhood.” The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) joined the conversation, recognizing the “architectural value” of Charles Street AME Church and announcing its readiness to “aid in the restoration and improvement of the building”; long before, the classical ornamentation around the clock tower had been removed. The group was more concerned about what might replace the church—“an ugly, tall, modern building”—and its role in the “spoil[ing of] the general effect of Beacon Hill” than about what would be lost, confessing to readers of the Boston Transcript that “there is no great historical value attached to the church.”

Black Bostonians recognized its historical value. In 1900, Pauline Hopkins recounted the church’s history in her first novel, Contending Forces. Sitting in the pews, protagonist Sappho Clark ruminates on “the romantic history of the fine old edifice. The building, so the story ran, was the place of worship of a rich, white Baptist congregation in the years preceding the emancipation. Negroes were allowed in the galleries only.” Then, an act of resistance: “Believing this color-bar to be a stigma on the house of God, a few of the members protested, but finding their warnings unheeded, withdrew from the church.” The novel refers here to the Charles Street Baptist Church's restriction of Black members to the first two rows of the gallery above the whites-only pews. In 1836, Timothy Gilbert, a white congregant, challenged the segregated seating along with other Black congregants by asking them to join together in his pew. They were expelled from the church with other vocal antislavery, antidiscrimination Baptists and eventually established the First Free Baptist Church’s Tremont Temple in 1843.

The Baptist leadership not only insisted on segregated seating, but it was also one of the more conservative congregations in Boston on the subject of slavery. In 1841, The Liberator published editorials by Stillman Lothrop, a white congregant excommunicated from the church for denouncing it as proslavery because of pastor Daniel Sharp’s decision to “prevent free discussion upon slavery” and to invite “slaveholders to [his] pulpit and communion.” Sharp, who was pastor from 1812 until 1853, was one of the influential northern Baptist clerics who did not preach against slavery and instead blocked abolitionists’ attempts to amend Baptist societies’ constitutions with bars against enslavers.

With dwindling numbers and mounting debt in 1876, Charles Street Baptist Church needed to sell the building and found a buyer in a Black congregation of 200 crowded into a wood-frame dwelling at 37 Anderson St. The First AME Society, established in 1833 as the denomination’s second church in New England, made a bid. “When it was known the colored people were making efforts to purchase that church, it is said that great opposition was made, and that several large offers were made to the trustees of Charles Street Baptist Society to induce them not to sell it to the trustees of the First A.M.E. Society,” Boston Daily Globe reporter Robert Teamoh quoted members reminiscing at a celebration in December 1889. Because of the racist backlash, “during the negotiations, when the pastor and trustees wanted to inspect the property, they were compelled to go at dawn of day, and to enter the building one by one.” Persevering, church leaders accumulated enough donations from their congregation, which included formerly enslaved people, to purchase the spacious church.

Hopkins’s Sappho reveled in the irony of how the story played out. As of December 1876, the “despised people, who were not allowed a seat outside of the galleries, now owned and occupied the scene of their former humiliation. It was solemn and wonderful dispensation of Providence, and filled the girl’s heart with strong emotion.” AME historian Richard R. Wright Jr. highlighted this same point in 1916: “the Negroes of Boston were only allowed to occupy the first two rows in the gallery on the Charles Street side during the services. Now they own the building.” The congregation subsequently prospered and the church became a nationally recognized meeting place for civil rights activism: for example, the Colored National League and the National Federation of Afro-American Women were founded and met there. This chain of events carried the message that African Americans could protest segregation alongside committed white allies, prosper, and emerge victorious in the long term, a salient tale to have on hand in this moment of hardening Jim Crowism. By 1919 when the street widening threatened their church building, almost all of the AME congregants had relocated to the South End and Lower Roxbury. Rev. Montrose W. Thornton and the majority of the trustees wanted to sell while the majority of the congregation, led by trustee Dr. William Worthy, voted to preserve it by moving the building ten feet for the Charles Street expansion. Worthy’s faction won the day and saved their storied church. Despite having to ride buses across town to get to church, the congregation continued worshipping there until 1939. At that time, a group of white Beacon Hill neighbors who had been supporting the restoration effort and maintenance costs helped facilitate the congregation’s move to Upper Roxbury, where it remains today. In return, the Charles Street Meeting House Society, comprising many of the same neighborhood preservationists from the street widening controversy, now led by the historian John Gardner Greene, bought the church. They declared “the descendants of hard-headed Yankees . . . refused to allow one of Boston’s historic buildings [to] become a heap of junk in the wrecker’s yard,” devaluing sixty-three years of stewardship by the First AME Society and its role in saving it from demolition.

While for more than two decades the Beacon Hill preservationists insisted that the church’s value derived only from its age and visual prominence, as soon as they gained control of the structure they decided its history could be an asset as well. In 1940, Greene published a history of the church in Old-Time New England. He lauds the accomplishments of Sharp, whose ministry was “strong” and was “rewarded by almost universal respect of the people of Boston.” Greene doesn’t identify any of the exceptions to that sentiment registered by Gilbert, Lothrop, and the historically unnamed Black congregants; nor does he call attention to Sharp’s policy of racially segregated seating, the subject of a yearlong series of sermons at Tremont Temple on its history in 1939. Greene also wrote that “members of the church had long shown a sympathetic understanding of the problems of colored people. Meetings were held in the Meeting-House in the interest of the abolition of slavery . . . those who spoke there for the freedom of the slaves were William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.”

How did Greene arrive at these facts? A search of Massachusetts periodicals reveals no instances of any of these famous individuals speaking at Charles Street Baptist Church over the course of its existence. Periodicals of the time made note of every sermon given and other minutiae. Garrison would not have spoken at a church labeled “proslavery” in multiple issues of his newspaper, but if he had, surely The Liberator would have publicized it. Greene’s claims were most likely misreadings of Wright’s 1916 history of the church, which stated that such abolitionists “have been a part of this congregation and contributed some of the best service in times past.” Wright’s “congregation” was in reference to the First AME Society when it was in its former building, not in reference to antebellum happenings at Charles Street Baptist Church. While it could potentially be understandable to miscomprehend this fact, it was another thing entirely to skip over the two separate occasions in Wright’s one-page history where he mentions segregated seating and forming the Tremont Temple.

Omitting the Baptists’ mistreatment of Black congregants and Sharp’s proslavery associations while fabricating new antislavery associations pasted over the history of racial discrimination and diminished the resistance Black Bostonians faced. The absence of the Tremont Temple story and the claim to antislavery activism took agency away from Black Bostonians, reframing the series of events to make it appear as though they were handed the church by charitable white former antislavery activists instead of buying the church because they had grown more prosperous by their own doing. Greene says as much: “When it became necessary for the Baptists to sell the Meeting-House, it was natural that they should wish to sell it to a Negro congregation.” There was no mention, either, of how white neighbors had tried to prevent the church from landing in Black hands.

Greene’s version of history constituted another case of celebrating Boston’s antislavery history while neglecting to acknowledge the “broadcloth mob,” the majority of elite white Bostonians who opposed abolition for a significant duration of the antislavery movement. Between the option of confronting hard truths of racial discrimination in Boston’s past—that may have reminded them of racial discrimination in the present—and resting on Boston’s mythic laurels, Greene and his compatriots seemed more interested in the latter. Every mention of Charles Street Meeting House up to the present day, from scholarly histories to tourist guidebooks, by white and Black authors alike, notes the antislavery myth. Yet, while Greene wielded the ability to influence public memory with institutional histories, Worthy and his descendants retained their own accounts of the past. Engaged in a battle to save the Rhodes Tavern in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, Worthy’s daughters Ruth and Myrtle recalled in the Washington Afro-American weekly newspaper that the Black citizens who “rallied to the cause of saving their Church” were motivated to do so because of how the building had been “hard won earlier from some hard-core Baptist segregationists.”