There hasn’t been a church survey posting in a while. I think I posted all the main ones I wanted to post. Unfortunately, I wasn’t uniform with my file naming so I’m figuring out which ones are and aren’t in the survey.
What survey? Well in 1957 there was as survey of churches in the Northwest Urban Renewal Area, which included Shaw, Downtown, and the area around Union Station. The Northwest Urban Renewal Area was a precursor to the Shaw Urban Renewal Area, which later was known as Shaw. To learn more about the 1957 Church Survey read my previous post Church Survey Northwest Urban Renewal Area October 1957.
There were six ‘steeple’ Methodist Churches in the Northwest Urban Renewal Area. They were Galbraith, Hemingway Temple AME, Israel CME, John Wesley AME, Miles Memorial CME, and Mt. Vernon.
There were three fringe area churches captured by the survey: Asbury, Metropolitan and Turner Memorial.
The list of storefront churches, unfortunately don’t seem to line up. There was a Free Methodist Mission at 28 Eye St NW, but I can’t seem to find a corresponding survey sheet for it. Not every storefront was surveyed.
Most of the steeple churches were Black and middle class with a majority of their membership being white collar, professional and/or skilled labor.
I’m currently suffering through the father of Black History, Carter G. Woodson’s History of the Negro Church, which is providing some explanation of how the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) and CME (Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (the C was changed to Christian in 1954)) churches were formed.
I’ll save any lessons learned from Woodson’s book that may be applied to these surveys for Black History Month. I should be done with the book by then.