by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was just about a half-dozen years ago that an invitation was received by The Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation‘s executive director, Jackie Broxton, to join a project called “The Long Road to Freedom” regarding the life and times of Biddy Mason (1818-1891), a leader for close to four decades in the small, but vibrant and growing, Black community of Los Angeles and subject of a book coming out later this year by Kevin Waite, a leader of the collaborative. Since then, support for this work has included posts on this blog under the title of “The Black Pioneers of Los Angeles County” and others exploring aspects of the Angel City’s African-Community from the 1850s to the 1890s.
Yesterday, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church held a morning service that included the celebration of Black History Month. Proclamations were presented to the Church and the Foundation from Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna, District Attorney Nathan Hochman and California Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond. Also in attendance were former Los Angeles mayor and gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa and Diane Watson, who served in the State Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives and was Ambassador to Micronesia.
With the joyous singing and music of the Church choir and band, the impassioned sermons of the pastorate and the fervent participation and response from the congregants, the service was a very moving and powerful experience. Afterward, a brunch and unveiling of a sign in front of the Foundation’s headquarters nearby marking the site as part of the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad program. NPS intern and college student Isaiah Martin, who has done much great work on Biddy Mason and the efforts made in Los Angeles during 1855-1856 to free her and other enslaved Black people, opened with remarks about the project.
Further presentations made to Jackie and the organization by District Attorney Hochman and Superintendent Thurmond were because what the Foundation does is support young people coming out of the foster care system through a residential program as well as scholarships. What Jackie has ensured as part of the Foundation’s work is that history, focused on Black Los Angeles, but also incorporating other people of color as well as Anglos, is integral, both for the further education of those the organization serves and the community broadly.
It has been an honor and privilege, as well as transformational professionally and personally, to assist, help and support wherever possible and this multi-part post, sharing content from a special section of the 12 February 1909 edition of the Los Angeles Times focused on African-American Angeleños is one contribution the Homestead makes to “The Long Road to Freedom.” In this ninth part, we look at two articles related to religion among the Black residents of Los Angeles as a follow-up to the amazing day yesterday.
The Rev. G.R. Bryant came to Los Angeles from San Antonio at the end 1902 to take the pastorate (after its pastor suddenly vanished, with the church’s record, after prolonged controversy during his tenure) of Wesley Chapel, called a “colored” Methodist Episcopal Church, at 6th and Maple streets. The January 1904 issue of The Liberator, a Black newspaper in the Angel City, remarked that Bryant was “one of those quiet, earnest, conscientious men whose labors tell for the good of every community that has the good fortune to claim him as a citizen.”
It added that the Wesley Chapel, upon his arrival, was “almost in the throes of dissolution,” but Bryant “immediately brought order out of chaos, peace out of confusion and the church entered upon a career of usefulness and prosperity unprecedented in its history.” In addition to regaining members and adding new ones, more than doubling the congregation, the pastor presided over the sale of the Sixth and Maple property for $24,000 and bought one for half that price at San Julian and Eighth, in what was the African-American section of town. He was also credited with “the moral upbuilding of the community.
In his “Religious Life of Los Angeles Negroes,” Bryant noted that Black Angelenos were “largely made up of people from the South, whose ancestors were slaves” and that “the principal number of slave owners, who were religious, belonged to the Methodist (South) and Baptist churches,” so their slaves were forced to become congregants. The pastor added that “the negro people have the same problems to solve that confront all other races” and “how well they have succeeded” was the point of his essay.
First, Bryant observed that there were a trio of Methodist denominations in Los Angeles’ African-American community, these being the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion and the Colored Methodist Episcopal. The AME was the first as he commented that,
More than twenty years ago they started out with a small membership and labored under many disadvantages to pay for the old church property on Azusa street. They were at one time in such straitened circumstances for the payment of the property that one of the bishops advised the officials of the church to give up the property, but some of the faithful band held on until all could see the possibilities of paying the debt, which was done in 1902, under the pastorate of the Rev. J.E. Edwards. A new and better location for a church on the corner of Eighth street and Towne avenue was purchased and a large and beautiful house was erected at cost of over $20,000.
The First AME actually dated back four decades to 1869 and established a church in an existing building at Charity (later renamed Grand Avenue) and 4th streets before a property was purchased and a house of worship built at San Pedro and Azusa streets, which is what Bryant mentioned. Then came the move to the 8th and Towne property, in the heart of what was then the main Black section of the city, and it was added that current pastor, the Rev. Dr. William H. Peck sold the older church parcel “for enough money to finish paying for the new church,” which counted some 900 members with two missions.
The AME Zion Church, Bryant continued, “was organized soon after the African Methodist Church, with less than twenty members,” though it was actually in 1887. A schism broke out in 1906 with the pastor dismissed and many members moving to join the First AME. The Rev. William D. Speight transferred from Arkansas and “has been able to restore harmony, and the church is in a prosperous condition with one of the finest church edifices for negroes in the State.” The Colored Methodist Church organized early in 1906 and had 45 members and a parsonage with a house of worship soon to be built and a new pastor, the Reverend S.L. Harris, coming from Texas.
In 1888, a few Black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church petitioned for a separate institution, which led to the formation of the Wesley Chapel. In September 1892, the 6th and Maple property was acquired. Bryant modestly left his name out when there was mention of the move to the current location effected, though he recorded that “the lots, buildings and furnishings” for the San Julian and Eighth property totaled $45,000. Even with the formation of a Long Beach church and a Mason Chapel in Los Angeles, the Wesley had more than 500 members. Mason, formed in 1903 had under a hundred congregants, but, under the leadership of Harvard University graduate George W. Pinkney, was “in a prosperous condition.”
Bryant commented that “the Second Baptist was the first of the negro denominations to organize in this city,” adding that the Rev. Chester H. Anderson headed it for nearly two decades. A trio of congregations then formed the Mt. Zion, New Hope and Tabernacle churches, while, in 1908, the Rev. Dr. McCoy, a Howard University alumnus, became pastor and ministered to some 500 members in a church valued at some $40,000.
At the end of 1907, Anderson organized the New Hope, taking 100 members from Second Baptist with him, the current number being 175 and worshiping in a church at Paloma and 16th streets worth $5,000. Bryant added that Anderson “is a wise and successful pastor” and “his church will soon become one of the strongest in the city.” The Tabernacle, under the Rev. John Dawson Gordon, had 300 congregants in “a beautiful church edifice valued at $10,000.” Mt. Zion, located at Stevenson Avenue (renamed East Third Street) and Hewitt Street, had services in a $20,000 church with the Rev. J.T. Hill said to be “one of the ablest pastors of his denomination” ministering over 200 members.
The Westminster church for Black Presbyterians was established in October 1904 and had 40 members at its location at 36th Street and Denker Avenue, a little west of the University of Southern California, with its pastor being the Rev. Dr. R.W. Holman., considered “a great preacher.” This was the only African-American church west of Main Street in Los Angeles. Merchant Benjamin F. Coulter was praised “for the gift of a neat church on East Eighth street, near Central avenue, which served “the negro constituency of the Christian Church.”
A small group of Black Episcopalians comprising the Mission of St. Philip, the Evangelist, worshiped in a hall, but “are soon to have a house of their own” and were led by E.L. Chew, who came to the Angel City after years in Atlanta and who “owns considerable real estate in Los Angeles” while also serving as “deputy Assessor and Tax Collector, the only clerical position held by a Negro in this city’s government.” Lastly, Bryant wrote that,
Negroes are to be found in almost all the other Christian denominations in Los Angeles. There are a large number of Roman Catholics, most of whom are members of the [St. Vibiana’s] Cathedral parish, and their numbers are constantly increasing.
The Reverend Gordon contributed “The Spiritual and Religious Nature of the Negro,” in which he cited Psalms 68:31 and its statement that “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God” and then remarked that Black Americans were “hindered in giving a full external expression to [their] nature and this hindered or pent-up energy recoils upon [the] spirit, fortifying it for some great future divine emergency.”
Put another way, Gordon remarked that,
The [Godward] expression is always limited and conditioned by that degree of mental unfoldment to which the race has attained, and if the mental, social and civil life of a people is limited by voluntary or involuntary hindrances from within or without, the religious or spiritual expression is hampered; even then you may judge the strength of this nature by its effects upon the race life. The different races of men are but so many keys in the great and mighty organ of divine expression.
The pastor referred back to the Civil War period and a previous generation of African-Americans when he noted that “the spiritual diplomacy and tract of the race, that enabled the negro to stand well . . . with the conquering army of the North . . . finds its expression in Booker T. Washington.” It was also asserted that “the negro’s spiritual or love nature has preserved him from annihilation in this country; had he been otherwise in his helplessness before the great Caucasian, he, like the Indian, would have gone down.” Yet, it was added, “nowhere is the negro so loved, individually, as in the South; there are white men there that will die with him and for him against any intruder; so strong is the attachment.”
Gordon informed the readers of the Times that “he who loves the negro must be able to pierce his exterior, which so often violates the world’s highest modern standard, but which conforms to an ancient and spiritual standard of which the world as yet knows only too little.” With spiritual development among human beings, “the negro’s real place and value will be revealed to the astonished world” as “he stands without a peer in simply soul lore.” The pastor exhorted,
Examine the songs of the race, for here spirituality finds expression as exhibited by the best jubilee singers, here the world is enraptured, even the so-called “coon song,” which is nothing but the trivial perversion of the negro’s spirituality . . . the “coon song” of the negro is his spirituality seeking to amuse the terror, while bracing his own sinking spirit. Yet with all of that it sweeps the earth like a mighty musical tornado; everybody speaking against it, and yet everybody singing or playing it . . . They say they are the songs of the slaves and that is why all slaves delight to sing them, for the whole world is seeking to be free, and while the bondage lasts the negro’s spirituality furnishes the music.
What distinguished Black music was that, in the songs, “you never hear one of revenge, never one of war, but most of love, crying beneath sorrows, while it hopefully waits for deliverance.” This, however, should not be mistaken for cowardice, as African-American fighting during the Spanish-American War well proved.
Gordon, moreover, pointed out that “the spiritual nature of the negro gives him elasticity and adjustability” and “the negro peeping from behind the iron bars of prejudice and proscription, will prove to the same to his white brother in war and in peace.” Part of the improvement of Black Americans was that “when the negro ceases to imitate the races around, in their mad chase for gold, and comes back into his own highest nature, he will again move the earth for perfect freedom.” To understand African-Americans, one had to “understand and appreciate the psychology as well as the history of [the] races.”
This extraordinary essay ended with Gordon’s pronouncement that,
All races have stood at the loom of providence, each weaving its own distinctive civilization, and many exhibited the woeful lack of the love-thread, thereby dooming its results, but in the march of soul enfoldment, the negro comes to take his place at the shuttle and in his weaving will combine every ennobling quality of the Christ mind, dotted here and there with truth and patience and bordered with the silken threads of his own love-nature, he will furnish the nations with a psychical apparel for the grand soul (dress) parade on the resurrection morning.
We will return soon with another page from this special section, featuring notable African-American women in Los Angeles and its environs, so be sure to look for that very soon as part of our contribution to Black History Month.
One aspect that deeply impressed me in this post is the extraordinary self-discipline and moral restraint demonstrated by African American communities during the era of slavery, despite enduring unimaginable injustice.
Their music, prayers, and spiritual life consistently emphasized love, dignity, and inner strength rather than destruction, violence, or revenge. This tradition of moral resilience is undoubtedly a powerful legacy and deserves to be remembered, preserved, and passed on. In the face of the many challenges confronting our free society today, few things would be more valuable than drawing upon such a refreshing and constructive spirit.