African Meeting House

The African Meeting House is the oldest Black church building standing in America — the brick meeting house on Smith Court that the African Baptist Church built in 1806, on the north slope of Beacon Hill, constructed almost entirely by Black craftsmen and laborers. Cato Gardner, a native African, raised $1,500 of the funds personally. The congregation had organized itself the year before — twenty-four members, fifteen of them women, under Reverend Thomas Paul — leaving the white Baptist churches to build a house of their own.

The meeting house became what the community needed it to be — church on Sundays, the African School downstairs on weekdays, and the gathering place they called the Black Faneuil Hall. William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in this building in 1832. Maria Stewart spoke from its pulpit — the first American woman to address a public audience of men and women. Frederick Douglass spoke here. The Massachusetts General Colored Association met here, and the New England Freedom Association ran its Underground Railroad work out of the same rooms. In 1863 the meeting house served as a recruiting station for the 54th Massachusetts — the first Black regiment of the Civil War.

The building's later life ran through a synagogue and a fire before the Museum of African American History bought it in 1972 and restored it. The National Historic Landmark sits at the end of the Black Heritage Trail — the narrow court on Beacon Hill where the oldest Black church in the country still stands at the address where abolition was organized.

The African Meeting House is the archive's cornerstone file — the building where Black Boston built its own institution and the antislavery movement found its Massachusetts home, older than the movement it helped create.