a Church

Inside the building and above a balcony overlooking the main body of the church, museum-style panels depicting the history of Myrtle Baptist Church line the walls. It’s a part of a church project that started in 2014 as an effort to preserve and celebrate the church’s rich heritage.

“We’re very proud of our history, and I want to say that our members know our history,” Shelby Robinson, the church’s history committee cochair, said. “We always, you know, we celebrate our anniversary, we always do a big reading of the history.”

Myrtle Baptist Church was founded in 1874 when a group of Black Newtonians left the church now known as Lincoln Park Baptist Church in Newton to create their own place of worship. Rev. Edmund Kelley, a former slave, was invited to preach to the group, and he became Myrtle Baptist Church’s first pastor.

“He was a huge activist, in terms of, obviously, the anti-slavery movement, and, you know, Black people having autonomy and things as such,” Robinson said. “He helped empower Black communities to begin their own churches.”

The creation of Myrtle Baptist Church was not without its opponents. Nathaniel Allen, a prominent white abolitionist and educator, criticized the creation of a Black church and insisted that it was a step back for the Black community, according to a letter Allen sent to The Newton Journal in 1874, provided by Robinson.

In response, Kelley wrote a letter in The Newton Journal defending the new church as a space for greater Black autonomy.

“We deny that there is any proscription in the colored churches, for they open to all classes … the differences being that [Black people] are as eligible to the front seats, as they are to the back seats in the white people’s churches when they are permitted to occupy any seats at all,” Kelley wrote.

According to Crossan, the church in general has played an irreplaceable role in mobilizing the African American community.

“[The church] was the one place where they could be free together, where they could worship, discuss issues,” Crossan said. “And that has been really long-standing, and when we look today, we would not be near where we are without the church.”

Despite Allen’s criticisms, the members of Lincoln Park Baptist Church were supportive of Myrtle’s creation and the departure of their Black members, according to Robinson. They completed church construction in 1875 on land gifted by D.C. Sanger, a deacon from Lincoln Park Baptist Church.

Church totally got it … it was all done, as they like to say, with love and support,” Robinson said.

In 1897, however, a fire destroyed Myrtle Baptist Church. There is speculation about whether or not the fire was lit intentionally, according to Robinson.

“There was a fire, okay, which Newton papers described as a fire of an incendiary nature,” Robinson said. “It was always thought that the fire was lit deliberately.”

Within the year, church members rebuilt the church on the same plot of land, where it remains to this day. Notably, the new structure included two stained glass windows, which now cut a striking image over Curve Street.

As the years progressed, the church acquired a generational history, according to Karen Haywood, wife of former pastor Rev. Howard Haywood.

“I used to look at the elders of the church and say, ‘Oh, you know, look at the elders of the church,’ and now I am them,” Haywood said. “So, a lot of people have passed on a lot of people that have had the same characteristics that I had passed on. There are many people that are born and bred.”

The church’s community, in addition to being home to a family-like legacy, also carries memory of its hardships.

See Church, A9

“The people at the Lincoln Baptist