African Meeting House

African Meeting House, meetinghouse, built in 1806 and located at 46 Joy Street in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., that is the oldest standing church for African Americans 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 Methodist—established in Boston between 1805 and 1848. Those churches were instituted because African Americans attending Euro-American churches were generally not allowed to sit in the nave with white congregants or to vote in those churches.

Origins

About 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. Its first meetings were held at Faneuil Hall—Boston’s public meeting hall where patriots of the American Revolution had held their meetings. There is a surviving account of a baptism of “nine Negroes” on May 26, 1805, during which Paul and his brother Benjamin led congregants to the waterside, leading a sermon, saying prayers, and singing as large numbers of people watched.

In 1805 Paul’s congregation purchased land in the West End of Boston, where most of the city’s blacks lived (a neighbourhood now called the North Slope of Beacon Hill). A new brick building costing $77,000 was built with funds raised from blacks and whites, with the construction done almost entirely by blacks. The building had three stories, measured 40 × 48 feet (about 12 × 15 metres), and contained 72 pews. The church was dedicated on December 6, 1806, and Paul was installed as its minister. He remained in that office until 1829.

Because two requests—one (1787) to the Massachusetts legislature and the other (1798) to the city of Boston—for separate schools for blacks had been denied (they had received “no benefit from the free schools”), the new church (which became known as the African Meeting House) also served for a time as a school for Boston’s African American children. The schoolroom was set up in the basement vestry of the church.

The school that met there was the privately funded African School. It originally had been organized in a home on the corner of George and May streets in the black community, but it was not very successful until it moved to the African Meeting House. The school remained at the meetinghouse until 1835, when it moved to a new building and became the Smith Primary and Grammar School. Owned by the city, the school had an endowment from Abiel Smith, a wealthy Boston businessman who was an early supporter of the education of black youth.

The Black Faneuil Hall

The African Meeting House served as more than a place of worship and a school. The abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society at the Meeting House on January 6, 1832. Just as Faneuil Hall had been called “the cradle of liberty” because of the meetings held there to protest British tyranny before the Revolution, the African Meeting House was called the Black Faneuil Hall because of the meetings held there to protest slavery. The 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first black regiment of the American Civil War, also was recruited there in 1863 by African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

The African Meeting House also served as a focal point in the black community of Boston. As historian George Levesque noted,

“Ceremonial and recreational activities of all sorts were held in this the largest and most centrally located structure in the Negro community. Much of the history of black Bostonians in the middle years [of the 19th century] was planned and plotted, debated and discussed in this very house.”

Late 19th century to the present

By the late 19th century, Boston’s African American community had moved from the West End to the South End and Roxbury, and the African Meeting House was sold to a Jewish congregation, which used it as a synagogue. In 1905, the 100th anniversary of Garrison’s birth, 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 20th century. Nevertheless, the Museum of African American History acquired the building in 1972 and subsequently restored its interior to its appearance in 1855. Today the African Meeting House is a stop on the museum’s Black Heritage Trail, a walking tour of Boston that highlights the history of the city’s African American community. Together with the Abiel Smith School, the African Meeting House was declared a National Historic Site in 1974.