Anchor of Historically Black Neighborhood Approaches 100
Note:
The following article was written in February, before the COVID-19 pandemic changed so many aspects of daily life. These days, Wesley AME Church sits empty on Sundays. The congregation meets on Zoom — so far using just the audio feature, according to church member Kim Durnell, who is helping her neighbors negotiate the technology. Bible study is on Zoom too. “Everybody is welcome to join us,” Durnell says.
The community has been keeping its spirits up as best it can. Congregants stay connected by text and organize birthday caravans to celebrate milestone birthdays. One church member recently turned 88, another 91. Friends and neighbors drove by and dropped cards in a curbside basket one at a time. Then, keeping distance between them, they waved and sang.
“It’s hard to see people and not be able to embrace each other,” Durnell says.
This is especially true of funerals, which Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf’s stay-at-home order limits to 10 people, including clergy. As of this writing, two members of Wesley’s congregation have died of COVID-19.
Wilbur Dickerson and Thalia Smith after services at Wesley AME church in February. Photo: Rachel Pastan
If you walk down Bowdoin Avenue in Swarthmore, it might escape your notice that number 232 is not a residential house.
A modest building on a two-block-long street of modest buildings, 232 Bowdoin’s steeply pitched roof suggests a church. But without the signboard out front reading “Sunday Worship Service 11:00 a.m.” you wouldn’t know for sure.
Walk through the tall red doors on a weekday, and a hush greets you. White walls, dark beams, red carpet to match the pew cushions. Eight rows of pews sit empty in the light falling through the stained-glass windows. Plaques with the names of the church’s first families ornament the ends. It’s only a few steps to the sanctuary, where white flowers are arranged on a white-clothed altar, not far from an American flag.
On Sunday, of course, it’s a different story. As the pews start to fill up at a few minutes before eleven, the room is full of warm greetings. Everybody has a few words for everybody else, and the music minister, Quincy Goldwire — known as Minister Q — improvises on the piano to set the mood.
This is Wesley African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The building opened its doors in 1927, to serve the small black neighborhood that had grown up at the end of the nineteenth century around Bowdoin, Brighton, Kenyon, and Union avenues.
Neighborhood History
In 1921— after residents of the neighborhood decided they needed a church, but before they had a building — the fledgling congregation worshipped in Jones Hall, further down the street at 246 Bowdoin Ave. They bought the land at 232 Bowdoin Ave. for $500, then raised funds for the church building, which cost $11,400.
It may not be the oldest church in Swarthmore, or the grandest, but Wesley AME serves its congregation in a powerful and intimate way. Some of the worshippers today are the fifth and sixth generations of their families to live in this neighborhood and attend the church.
Jean Johnson Terrell’s grandmother moved to Swarthmore from Culpepper, Virginia. Back then, a lot of community members “worked for people up on the hill,” says Terrell, who lives on Union Avenue, referring to the part of town north of the railroad tracks. One was Terrell’s aunt, Celia Johnson, who was one of the founders of the church.
Betty Ann Coleman Wilson’s grandmother moved to Delaware County from Frederica, Delaware, taking a job first on the Thomas Leiper Estate in Wallingford and then at Swarthmore College. “We came and settled shortly after Jeanie’s family,” Wilson says. “We had a lot at the end of Union Avenue where three houses now sit.”
“Folks served as live-in help and days-work laborers,” observes Jeannine Osayande, one of Wilson’s daughters, speaking of her own forebears and those of her neighbors, who worked as maids, butlers, drivers, nannies, cooks, gardeners, launderers, mechanics, and farm workers.
“Historically, our neighborhood was looked down upon because it was a poor black segregated community,” Osayande’s sister, Annette Lee-Holmes, says.
“Regardless,” Osayande adds, smiling, “we always recognized our brilliance.”
To this day, several families make up the core of Wesley — Adamses, Colemans, and Johnsons, among others. They remember how things were in the old days when the congregation was bigger and the neighborhood more tightly knit. Lee-Holmes recalls how, in the old days, people would just walk into one another’s houses. “Doors were left unlocked. You could go into each other’s homes and have some coffee or some lemonade.”
A Pastor Who Puts People First
Over its history, Wesley AME has had 28 pastors. For the last six years, it has been the Rev. William L.B. Gray Sr. of Yeadon. Gray and his wife Brenda (“his armor-bearer,” Lee-Holmes calls her) have brought a new energy to a congregation that had been shrinking. Gray leads Bible study every Wednesday night, goes to kids’ basketball games, and visits the sick and the shut-in. Lee-Holmes says that the Grays “made us feel reconnected.”
“It’s a matter of putting first things first,” Gray says, acknowledging that the bishop chose him for this church because of his particular skills.
Both Grays are social workers, with experience in foster care, mental health, and child welfare. Brenda Gray says this makes it easy for them to connect with people and help them, both within the church and outside of it.
The congregation has many programs for those in need. They’ve collected coffee and Pampers for St. Bernadine’s Outreach Center in Chester; they’ve assembled health kits which included toothbrushes and towels for migrant worker communities near Kennett Square. “One thing about membership here,” Rev. Gray says, “is that they always give more than what we’re asked to give.”
Gray may have been brought here because of his people skills, but his preaching is also powerful and stirring. One Sunday in February he took Jeremiah for his text: “If you act justly toward one another, if you no longer oppress the foreigner and the fatherless and the widow,” he preached — his words clearly alluding to events of the day — “then I will let you live in this place.”
He spoke of Pilate knowing that Jesus was innocent, yet giving in to the powers that be. And he exhorted his congregation to stand up for righteousness. He believes in telling his congregation how he sees things. “I have to say what God moves me to say.”
AME History
Standing up for righteousness in the face of oppression is in the denomination’s DNA. The AME traces its origins to a group of black Methodists who, in 1787, left St. George Methodist Episcopal Church at Fourth and Arch streets in Philadelphia because of racial discrimination. As Brenda Gray explains:
“We were having prayer one morning. And we were praying too long. They told us to get up right now and go back to your seats. So our leader … said, ‘Let us linger here for a little while, and you won’t have to worry about us any more.’ So that day we walked out of that church and formed our own.”
The new congregation bought land at Sixth and Lombard streets in 1789 and built the Mother Bethel AME Church. Its lot is the longest continually owned real estate by black Americans anywhere in the nation.
Looking Toward the Future
As Wesley AME approaches its 100th anniversary, it is raising money for necessary repairs to the building’s foundation. Waterproofing the basement is expected to cost in the neighborhood of $40,000.
Preserving Wesley feels particularly critical now because the historically black neighborhood is changing so fast. Wilson estimates that it’s now only about 10% black. Jones Hall, where the congregation held their first church services, has been razed, and a new private home sits on that plot.
“People don’t understand the essence of what it means to have a historically black neighborhood,” Lee-Holmes says. “Folks took care of each other in the community. Children grew up in the neighborhood knowing that every mom in every house was a mom to them. Every dad, a dad, and every elder, a grandparent figure.”
She is quick to praise the church’s new neighbors, however. “They’re beautiful people.”
Osayande speaks with pride of the eight generations of black people whose families still live in the neighborhood and continue to make a difference within the borough. “Historically, black neighborhoods tell the American story of black genius, survival, and brilliance within a hegemonic society,” she says.
Some in the congregation regret the changes in their neighborhood and in the borough at large. That the once dry town now allows alcohol sales makes some of the elders feel the loss of the Quaker essence of the town.
Still, this is clearly a congregation more focused on joy than sorrow, and more oriented toward the future than the past. You can hear it in the sound of the Essence of Joy choir filling the little building during the service, and in the voices of the rest of the congregation answering back.
Gray often speaks directly to his parishioners from the altar, asking about the health of absent relatives and nodding at the answers. He calls to a boy who is having a birthday, reminding him that he’ll get a dollar from everyone who comes up during the offering, and the whole congregation pauses to sing “Happy Birthday.” After services, people linger in their pews (unless the Eagles are playing), talking and catching up.
One more big change looms for Wesley. Rev. Gray will be retiring this year. It’s a loss the congregants are already anticipating, but they hope that the Grays, who live in Yeadon, will become regulars in the pews.
That probably won’t happen right away, though. Rev. Gray thinks he’d better give the new pastor — whoever that turns out to be — a little time to settle in first.
Donations to the Wesley AME’s waterproofing fund may be sent to: Wesley AME Church, 232 Bowdoin Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
