Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [318]
In 1796 Williams joined with James Varick and other Methodists of color to establish the Zion Chapel in a cabinetmaker’s shop on Cross Street between Orange (Baxter) and Mulberry. The Zionites didn’t intend to withdraw from the John Street congregation, merely to worship together in an atmosphere free of racial animosity, but by 1799 they had concluded that they would be better off on their own. Encouraged by the example of Richard Allen, who had just founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, they obtained permission from Bishop Francis Asbury to form a new congregation.
Methodist Church on John Street, c. 1817. The figure in the doorway may be Peter Williams, the sexton. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Peter Williams, sexton of the John Street Methodist Church. (Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
In 1801 the dissidents incorporated as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and raised a house of worship on the corner of Leonard and Church streets. In remembrance of the little Cross Street chapel, it would be known as “Mother Zion.” Williams didn’t join Zion; though he supported and shepherded the separatist project, he stayed at John Street out of gratitude. By decade’s end, Zion had attracted many blacks to settle nearby, and it had become the nucleus of a mini-community within the larger Five Points neighborhood.
Brooklyn blacks traveled a similar road. In 1794 a small integrated congregation built the Sands Street Church on the same location where in 1766 Captain Thomas Webb had first conducted outdoor services. Blacks, who constituted a third to half of the communicants, were relegated to an “end gallery.” As friction with whites increased, they broke away to form the Bridge Street African Methodist Episcopal Wesleyan Church (1818), the oldest black church in Brooklyn. In 1809, meanwhile, nineteen African-American men and women, unwilling to accept racially segregated seating, had withdrawn from Manhattan’s First Baptist Church on Gold Street and established the Abyssinian Baptist Church in a building on Anthony, between Church and Chapel streets.
At Trinity too African Americans moved toward greater autonomy. Black Episcopalians had been worshiping apart from whites since the revolution, and they had been buried apart since 1696. Now Trinity acceded to their request for a separate chapel, the germ of what would later emerge as St. Philip’s Church. In 1794, moreover, a group of blacks, possibly these same Episcopalians, noted that the Negro Burial Ground was slated for development and petitioned the Common Council for a new cemetery. The city granted the request, set aside four lots on Chrystie Street, and contributed funds (as did Trinity) toward establishing a graveyard there.
Blacks organized themselves in secular society as well, in response to gradual emancipation and the rise of systematic prejudice. Most whites simply couldn’t imagine blacks as full members of a republican society, and there were plenty of veterans in town who remembered, as one man told a local paper, that area slaves “fought against us by whole regiments” during the Revolution and therefore didn’t deserve freedom. Free blacks responded by forming associations for (in the words of a contemporary report) their “mutual support, benefit, and improvement.” In 1808, for example, Peter Williams joined with other blacks to form the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. In doing so they followed a now common practice among the city’s artisans; indeed, the society’s first president was a house carpenter, and six of its founders