Witness: Two Hundred Years of African-American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, New York by Genna Rae McNeil et al. (review)

Harlem, designated by many as a black cultural capital, finds its spiritual center in the Abyssinian Baptist Church. At its height during the Great Migration, Abyssinian’s sacred edifice on 138th Street was home to 14,000 members and was pastored by such luminaries as Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and his son, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D–NY). Under such impressive leadership, Abyssinian emerged as a national pulpit that fused the social gospel with a commitment to political protest and community empowerment. In this meticulously researched tome, coauthors Genna Rae McNeil, Houston Bryan Roberson, Quinton Hosford Dixie, and Kevin McGruder chronicle the ebbs and flows of Abyssinian’s 200-year history, contributing significantly to congregational histories of the African American religious experience.

Witness traces Abyssinian’s birth to the independent church movement among free blacks in the wake of the Revolutionary War. In June 1809, fifteen African American members of First Baptist Church in New York, responding to the discriminatory practices of white parishioners, requested that they be dismissed to form their own congregation. The opening chapters explore these early years as Abyssinians tentatively sought to achieve autonomy and institutional stability as well as address the broader social and religious concerns of their community. By the dawn of the twentieth century, Abyssinian’s fortunes had stabilized, and its 1000-strong membership began to contemplate moving uptown to follow the growing waves of migrants from the post-Reconstruction South. The congregation relocated first to the Tenderloin district before finally settling in Harlem in 1922 during the pastorate of the elder Powell. The book’s most compelling chapters arguably center on the pivotal leadership of the Powells, who championed Abyssinian as a “model church” capable of addressing the holistic needs of Harlem’s black community. Consistent with the social gospel theology and institutional church framework of Reverdy Ransom, the Powells adopted “a broad conception of urban ministry” that included the provision of extensive social services combined with a strident political advocacy (p. 99). As Witness demonstrates, this tradition continued to define Abyssinian’s mission in the post–civil rights era as the church sought to address the challenges of growing class inequalities, unemployment, mass incarceration, and declining federal support for social services.

Scholarly studies of leading black congregations are, unfortunately, few and far between. As leading scholars in African American religious studies have lamented, “[C]hurch history generally and denominational history in particular are out of fashion … [making] progress [on black churches] … painfully slow.”¹ In this context, Witness represents an important addition to African American congregational history and joins more recent scholarly studies such as Clarence Taylor’s The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York, 1996) and Houston Bryan Roberson’s Fighting the Good Fight: The Story of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, 1865–1977 (New York, 2005) in tracing the contours of the nation’s leading black churches.