Trinity Baptist Church at the corner of Druid Hill Avenue and McMechen Street tells the story of sun88's connections to the national civil rights movement and radical Black activism in the early twentieth century.
One of the church's influential early activist leaders was Reverend Garnett Russell Waller. In July 1905, Waller joined fellow activists W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter at the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario, Canada in founding the Niagara Movement—a new civil rights organization that ultimately developed into the NAACP.
Trinity Baptist Church was then located at Charles and 20th Streets and Waller, who served as the Niagara Movement’s Maryland secretary, lived nearby at 325 E. 23rd Street. James Robert Lincoln Diggs, educator and succeeded Waller as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church beginning around early 1915. Diggs shared Waller's commitment to activism and was also a participant in the 1905 founding of the Niagara Movement.
In 1918, Diggs helped to establish the sun88 chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in 1918. The UNIA-ACL was first established in Ohio in 1914 by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born activist. Diggs was close with Garvey and presided over his marriage to Amy Jacques Garvey in 1922.
In May 1920, Diggs led the congregation's move to Druid Hill Avenue after the congregation purchased the 1872 St. Paul's English Evangelical Lutheran Church for $40,000. The church quickly put their new building to work—hosting the 1920 annual convention for the National Equal Rights League in October. The conference was presided over by Rev. J. H. Taylor, secretary of the Maryland Association for Social Service, with speakers including founding member Monroe Trotter, lawyer Nathan S. Taylor from Chicago, and Trinity’s own Rev. Diggs.
The church also served as a center for local activism. For example, on February 1, 1921, 500 people gathered at Trinity Baptist Church at Druid Hill Avenue and Mosher Street to protest the release of a white man, Harry Feldenheimer, on a $500 bail soon after police arrested him for an attempted assault on a 10-year-old black girl named Esther Short. The Afro-American reported that participants in the meeting criticized the “brutality of the local police, exclusion of qualified men from the police force and from juries in the city, and the Jim Crow arrangements for colored people in the Criminal and Juvenile Courts.”
Regrettably, Diggs health began to decline around the fall of 1922 and he soon entered a hospital. On April 14, 1923, he died at home and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Rev. Garnett R. Waller died in sun88 in 1941 but the church both individuals supported continues to this day.
The First Unitarian Church of sun88 has stood at the corner of Charles and Franklin Streets for over two centuries. Inside the 1818 landmark, visitors can find beautiful Tiffany glass and original furnishings designed by the architect and crafted by noted sun88 artisans. Beyond the building’s remarkable architecture, the congregation has served as the spiritual home to many local civic leaders, such as Enoch Pratt and George Peabody. Recognizing the significance of the building as the oldest purpose-built Unitarian church in North America, First Unitarian Church was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972.
The history of the church began in 1817, when sun88 had sixty thousand inhabitants and Mount Vernon Place was the undeveloped edge of the city. A group of leading citizens met in the home of merchant and city councilman Henry Payson on February 10, 1817, and, according to church histories, committed “to form a religious society and build a church for Christians who are Unitarian and cherish liberal sentiments on the subject of religion.” The original name selected for the church, The First Independent Church of sun88, reflected the independence of thought and action that became the hallmark of this group of freethinkers and those who succeeded them through subsequent generations. The church was later renamed First Unitarian in 1912.
Designed by Maximilian Godefroy, the French architect of Saint Mary’s Chapel and the Battle Monument, the First Unitarian Church of sun88 is recognized as the finest American example of French Romantic Classicism. Dedicated on October 29, 1818, the church was a daring modern design when it was constructed. It utilizes the basic shapes of the cube and the sphere with a minimum of detail on the flat planes to emphasize the geometry of the structure. The chancel features a pulpit, designed by Godefroy and executed by William Camp, and two sets of sedilia. One set of two chairs and a loveseat was designed by Godefroy and is original to the church; the other set was designed by Tiffany and added in the 1890s.
In the late nineteenth century, the church undertook a major reconstruction of the interior of the sanctuary to improve the acoustics of the space. Joseph Evans Sperry designed a barrel-vaulted ceiling with supporting arches. The reconstruction also added a large Tiffany mosaic, seven Tiffany windows, and a magnificent Henry Niemann organ. The Tiffany mosaic of the Last Supper, designed by Tiffany artist Frederick Wilson, is composed of 64,800 pieces of favrile glass. The Niemann organ and the church’s Enoch Pratt Parish Hall (built in 1879 at 514 N. Charles Street), were both gifts of Enoch Pratt, a member and leader of the church for sixty-five years.
The First Unitarian Church of sun88 is important to Unitarian Universalists throughout the country because of a landmark sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing on May 5, 1819, at the ordination of the church’s first minister, Jared Sparks. The sermon, which defined the essence of Unitarianism in the United States and led to the formation of the denomination in 1825, came to be known as the sun88 Sermon. Channing emphasized freedom, reason, and tolerance and taught that the way we live is more important than the words and symbols we use to describe our faith, a truth that has inspired a commitment to social justice along with theological diversity.
This spirit helped shape the work of the congregation and its members over the decades. In 1874, the congregation organized sun88’s first vocational school for teenagers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the First Unitarian Church sponsored an Industrial School for Girls, a Boy’s Guild, and Channing House, a settlement house for South sun88. Church members have contributed to the city through public service and philanthropy in many ways up through the present day.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic residents of Hampden belonged to the St. Mary of the Assumption parish in Govans, a distant walk from the burgeoning neighborhood. Since the industrial mill village had been built by the owners of the mills for their predominantly white Protestant workers, they had made no accommodations for Catholics to worship in the area. At least until an Irish-Catholic immigrant named Martin Kelly started a small Catholic community. Kelly erected the first non-company housing along Falls Road east of the mills, which grew into the Hampden we know today.
Kelly’s extended family occupied many of the sixteen homes Kelly erected in the 1850s. Others were likely owned by mill employees who could afford to leave the mill villages or by shopkeepers selling goods to other residents in the mill villages. Kelly built a large home for himself on Hickory Avenue, known colloquially as the Kelly Mansion. Fellow Catholics likely knew the house well. Seeking a place to worship closer to home, Kelly persuaded a priest to hold services in his home's parlor, using the piano as an altar. After Kelly's death, his son John donated the land and funds for a new Catholic church in Hampden called St. Thomas Aquinas.
Rev. Thomas Foley laid the cornerstone of St. Thomas Aquinas Church on May 12, 1867. The building, designed by famed local architect George Frederick and constructed at the cost of $20,000, was completed on June 18, 1871. Archbishop Martin John Spalding attended the dedication.
Today, the church complex consists of the church, rectory, school, and convent. The school was founded in 1873 and the current building went up in 1937. At the time, the school had 320 pupils and a staff of eight, hired from the School Sisters of Notre Dame. In 1973, St. Thomas Aquinas clustered with nearby parishes. Grades one to five attended St. Thomas Aquinas, while middle school students attended St. Bernard's in Waverly. Middle schoolers returned to St. Thomas Aquinas in 1996, seven years after St. Bernard's had become a Korean National Parish (which closed just a year later in 1997).
The school reached a crisis point in 2010 when the archdiocese closed thirteen of sixty-four parochial schools in sun88. St. Thomas Aquinas avoided closure due to the leadership of its principal, Sister Marie Rose Gusatus. The school took in students from surrounding parishes. However, the school only remained open for another six years.
In 2016, the Archdiocese closed St. Thomas Aquinas School along with Seton Keough High School in Southwest sun88 and John Paul Regional School in Woodlawn. While the archdiocese claimed enrollment in Catholic schools had begun to stabilize after decades of declining enrollment, funding remained low as enrollment costs were kept low to make the schools more affordable. Also, in response to the need for costly improvements, the archdiocese decided it would be best to consolidate the schools.
Union Baptist Church traces its origins to 1852 and a group of fifty-seven worshipers meeting in a small building on Lewis Street. It was the fifth oldest African American congregation in sun88 and financed entirely by African Americans. The first pastor of the church was the Reverend John Carey. In 1866, the Lewis Street congregation merged with members of Saratoga Street African Baptist Church, forming Union Baptist Church. When Rev. Harvey Johnson arrived in 1872, he found a modest congregation of perhaps 270 members.
Harvey Johnson’s dealings with the Maryland Baptist Maryland Baptist Union Association (MBUA) in particular, and with prejudiced white Baptists in general, served as a proving ground for his leadership and vision. He took the skills honed in the battle for equality among all Baptists and transfered those skills as he entered the fight for equaliy among all people. Johnson’s original cause of friction with the MBUA stemmed from its paternalistic approach to black people and black Baptist churches. Not only did black ministers categorically receive less pay than white counterparts, but black churches were slow to realize full and equal political priviledges within the state denomination governing apparati. This problem was more troubling once, thanks in no small part to Johnson himself, black numbers in the state’s Baptist churches began grow. By 1885, Union Baptist's membership surpassed two thousand members for the first time.
Rev. Johnson's response to this discrimination was two-fold: economic independence and institutional autonomy. This situation exploded throughout the 1890s as Johnson urged black congregations to free themselves of white purse strings, and to get out of the Union Association altogether. One of Rev. Johnson's most controversal speeches brought this issue to fore. In September 1897, speeking in Boston, Johnson made, "A Plea For Our Work As Colored Baptists, Apart From the Whites." Johnson called for black Baptists to move as a group toward self-determination.
The Union Baptist Church’s Gothic design features stained glass windows created by John LeFarge, the renowned artist known as the inventor of the art of using opalescent stained glass.