153 years of Ebenezer Baptist Queens’ oldest Baptist church has storied history

by Sophie Krichevsky Associate Editor

As the oldest Baptist church in Queens, it’s no surprise that Flushing’s own Ebenezer Baptist Church, founded in 1870, has a rich history of its own.

That’s clear from the moment one walks in the door. The walls are covered in framed photographs of the church’s pastors, documents regarding the history of Flushing’s Black community and plaques honoring various members of the church. On the back wall of the church’s sanctuary hangs a time capsule, compiled by members in 2000. Church historian and longtime member Gails Bridges said she’s looking forward to opening it come 2025. (She beamed when she noted that the lettering on the front of the time capsule had been painted by her daughter.)

But over the years, Ebenezer has also become deeply ingrained in Queens’ own history, particularly when it came to uplifting the borough’s Black community and the fight for civil rights more broadly.

While the church has always been on Prince Street near Northern Boulevard, the building itself has gone through three different iterations. Before the first went up, Bridges told the Chronicle, services and meetings were held at members’ homes, many of whom lived or had businesses along Prince Street, Main Street, Northern Boulevard and College Point Boulevard.

The church’s first edifice was built under the Rev. J.C. Brown, who was pastor there between 1907 and 1913, according to one church document summarizing the congregation’s history. But that did not last long, per the same document — within a decade of its establishment, the building was destroyed in a fire; the Rev. W.J. Lucas was pastor at the time. The church was rebuilt for $6,000 (which is equivalent to more than $120,000 today). That building, 36-06 Prince St., is next door to Ebenezer’s home today, located at 36-12 Prince St.; Ebenezer’s former building is now occupied by the Queens Baptist Church.

the leadership of likely the church’s most well-known pastor in its 153 years, the Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell. According to Mobley, Mitchell wanted the church to have the tallest steeple in all of Queens.

Why? Just because he could? “That’s a good way of putting it,” Mobley said, though it’s not clear if the steeple actually is the tallest in the World’s Borough.

Civil Rights

Known for his work at the church and as a civil rights activist, Mitchell came to Ebenezer as an infant (he was even baptized there), as his father, the Rev. James Mitchell, served as the church’s pastor. The elder Mitchell would hold that post for 17 years. Meanwhile, Mitchell grew up in the community, attending Flushing High School, Queens College and New York University Seminary. A number of Mitchell family photos hang on the wall near the landing of the church’s lower level.

ough called Queens, and I want to go to that Ebenezer.’” From there, the two reverends developed a friendship. Mitchell would go on to lead the New York chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign.

But Mitchell’s involvement — and by extension, the church’s — with the Civil Rights Movement was not limited to the national push. He and members became active in a number of Queens efforts, as well.

marks Preservation Commission. The house was deemed a landmark in 1995.

In 1994, the church celebrated the tricentenial of Black people living in Flushing, per a 1694 census. Ebenezer even received a letter from then-President Clinton, congratulating the church on the milestone and the celebration.

At a certain point, it became necessary to refer to Mitchell as Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell — not only did his son, Timothy I. Mitchell, become an associate pastor at Ebenezer, but at times, the elder Mitchell was confused with the Rev. Timothy Mitchell at Antioch Baptist Church in Jamaica, according to a 2003 New York Daily News article.

Members of Ebenezer joined Flushing activist Mandingo Osceola Tshaka in the fight to recognize the approximately 1,000 Black people and Native Americans whose bodies were buried under what was then called the Martin’s Field Playground. Some sent letters to area elected officials, urging them to remove the playground and replace it with a memorial. Ultimately, Tshaka worked to broker a compromise, under which the playground would remain and a memorial would be built at the park. That was officially unveiled in 2021.

The church moved into its current home in approximately 1974, — or “marched in,” as both Bridges and the Rev. Carlton Mobley put it many times.

“In the Black Baptist church tradition, when they build a new building, they’ll go outside, go down the block just a little bit to say they ‘marched in’ there,” Mobley said when asked about the turn of phrase. “People like to say, ‘We marched in,’ I mean, it’s right next door — you really didn’t march,” he said with a chuckle. He suspected the term originated, in one form or another, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The new church building was built under

After serving in the Korean War, Mitchell returned to Ebenezer in 1961 to become the church’s pastor. Around that time, Mitchell marched with the Albany Freedom Movement, an early effort in the Civil Rights Movement led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP and, later, King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And while he was once even jailed with King during that effort, according to Mobley, that’s not how Mitchell came to know the civil rights hero. Mobley said he’d been told the story by the Rev. Al Sharpton. “Everybody wanted to get to know who Tim Mitchell was,” Mobley said. Plus, King was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Mobley noted. So while on a trip to New York, Sharpton told Mobley, “[King] said, ‘I want to go to this church in your bor-

In 1972, Mitchell advocated for the construction of a low-income housing complex in Forest Hills; the controversial project was viewed as a symbol of the predominantly white and Jewish neighborhood’s resistance to integration. When future Gov. Mario Cuomo, then a young lawyer whom Mayor Lindsay appointed to assess the controversy, put forth a compromise that would cut the size of the three proposed buildings in half, Mitchell made his opposition known at a City Hall hearing on the project. The next day, Sept. 21, 1972, an unhappy Mitchell could be seen toward the back of a photo on the front page of The New York Times.

According to Bridges, Mitchell was constantly leading marches in the streets of Flushing, always with his signature bullhorn in hand. The bullhorn has become a prized artifact of Ebenezer’s; according to Mobley, it went unused from the time of Mitchell’s passing in 2012 to this past summer, when the church celebrated the 10th anniversary of a street co-naming in his honor.

When the home of Lewis Latimer — then on Kissena Boulevard and Holly Avenue — faced the possibility of being torn down for development in 1988, Mitchell helped form the Committee to Save the Latimer House, and ultimately got it moved to the intersection of Leavitt Street and 137th Street, according to a document from the Land-

Neither Latimer nor Tshaka had any affiliation with Ebenezer. But that did not matter to Mitchell, Bridges said; in his view, supporting Black people in Queens was the natural thing to do. While sometimes that meant organizing marches, other times that meant providing hot meals to the needy.

Over his 46 years in the role, Mitchell had become known as the “Prince of Prince Street,” Bridges said. As she put it in a previous interview with the Chronicle, “[Mitchell] would walk down the street and could talk to anybody ... “He asked you to do things for the church — you did them.” Q