Drawing of what the Mother AME Zion Church in Little Africa looked like.
As featured in Columbia News Service.
On the corner of West 10th Street and Bleecker was a stately church. Packs of people, wearing the finest clothes their meager salaries could afford, came in and out for morning or evening masses, and hourly lyceums where speakers lectured on literature, politics and history. The Mother AME Zion Church was always crowded no matter the time of day, serving as a home for Black people hungry for knowledge and community.
But inside the building, members were searching for something else: freedom to exist without Jim Crow discrimination and brutality, a regular occurrence for most Black people in the 19th century who attended church.
“The church created a university within the center of the community,” said Reverend Malcolm Byrd, the current pastor of Mother AME Zion Church.
But there’s barely any trace of the church or its history in the Greenwich neighborhood now.
Nearly 160 years later, a walk around the area includes trendy boutiques, quirky coffee shops and dog walkers. But that part of Greenwich Village was once referred to as “Little Africa,” where one church became the center of the Black community.
“The church was the center of life for Black people; one space where Black lives didn’t revolve around whiteness,” said Byrd, who is at the help of the church in its current Harlem location.
Founded by a bishop named James Varick, Mother AME Zion was first established when a group of African Americans formally voted to leave the white John Street Methodist Church in 1820, to form their own Black congregation elsewhere, where they weren’t segregated or treated as inferior.
“Without question, this was the only option for African American leadership,” said Byrd, who sees the Little Africa church as the first step towards liberation for Black New Yorkers.
After the Civil War, a wave of formerly enslaved people from the South, migrated to northern states. Little Africa became one of the final destinations for Black people searching for a better life.
Although slavery had been abolished in New York in 1827, African Americans were still subjected to racism. Mother AME Zion was born as a church in the traditional sense, but it represented something larger for the Black community: an anti-slavery institution within a church, explains Byrd.
Besides the AME church, Little Africa was also home to one of the first African Free Schools on Mulberry Street. Over 500 children of formerly enslaved people were given an education, writing essays, and putting on plays tackling the very recent trauma of slavery.
The first Black theatre, the African Theater, also originated in Little Africa. With 25 cents, the community, excluded from white venues, could enjoy plays and ballets, performed by a Black cast led by William Alexander Brown, one of the first Black playwrights of America.
“For the most part it was very integrated,” said Dena Tasse-Winter about Little Africa. Tasse-Winter, the director of research and preservation at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, advocates for the protection of historic buildings on protected historic buildings in the neighborhood.
By the 1860s, Little Africa was home to a quarter of the city’s African American population which hovered around 12,500 people, and was the first home for “black and tan” saloons where Black and white people could mix freely in public venues.
But what happened to Little Africa?
After World War I, Italian immigrants established themselves in the area displacing the Black community that slowly moved Uptown. Now, if one wants to know about Little Africa, a trip to Harlem is the only way to find out.
“Serving the community is paramount,” said Arilla Whitehurst, a longtime member of Mother Zion who serves as the curator of the church’s museum.
As Black people migrated to Harlem, the church followed its people. By the 1910s, Black people were 70% of the population Uptown. Mother AME Zion settled on West 37th Street in 1925, where it has remained for the last 98 years.
“The history of Little Africa was definitely lost by not protecting and remembering the neighborhood,” said Tasse-Winter about Greenwich Village. Although nothing is left in the neighborhood downtown, the history of the church has been kept alive for decades through oral history and the church museum that opened in 2019, containing artefacts from the past five locations of the church.
The museum is in a small room in the basement of the Harlem church, where there are old pictures of the former AME bishops, church ushers and choir members, an old bible, manumission papers and James Varrick’s tomb.
Whitehurst pointed out three small boxes containing the ashes from a mortgage burning ceremony in 1985. “We as a black race were never able to own anything,” said Whitehurst. The ceremony was to celebrate the long-awaited ownership over the church building. “We could finally keep our faith and keep a place.”
“The Church is not the building; that’s why we survived,” said Byrd, explaining that thousands of African Methodist Episcopal Churches have been established around the world.
“This is a church that made it against all odds.”
Cecilia Blotto 