The Rise of the Storefront Church & the Great Migration

St. Luke AME’s storefront church location at 139-141 West 126th Street is a rare, still-extant example of the wide proliferation of storefront churches during the 1930s in Harlem as a result of the Great Migration. A 1981 New Yorker article about Harlem during the 1930s describes this phenomenon: It was the storefront churches that had multiplied the fastest. ‘There is something like one hundred and sixty colored churches in Harlem,’ James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1930. ‘A hundred of these could be closed and there would be left a sufficient number to supply the religious needs of the community.’

The hundred that Johnson had in mind were the storefront churches. Storefront churches became a unique religious institution for African Americans during the Depression. These churches were started in northern cities by southern black migrants (who came during the Great Migration), who were often poorer than middle and upper income African Americans. Historian Jill Watts describes the rise of the storefront church in her book, God, Harlem U.S.A.: A religious alternative for working-class blacks evolved-the storefront church. In urban centers across the country, African Americans joined together and organized congregations, most independent, owning no allegiance to nationally established denominations. Other new sects had ties to Spiritualists, Baptists, Holiness orders, and African Methodist Episcopal churches.

Working-class African Americans selected their own leaders and organized churches in rented rooms or buildings. . . . Many who worshipped in storefront churches were recent arrivals from the rural South who found the mainstream churches stifling and unwelcoming. Through their independent churches, African-American newcomers attempted to restore, to a degree, familiar patterns in their religious life.

Independent storefront churches were also a component in the black migrants’ search for a new identity. Most major denominations maintained churches in the poorer black neighborhoods. If migrants had wished solely to simulate past religious experiences, they would have sought out their previous religious affiliations. Exhausted by rigid and irrelevant church discipline and the exclusionary church hierarchy they encountered in many of the major denominations, some blacks found that storefront churches more effectively addressed their needs. Threatened by the popularity, spontaneity, and proliferation of new faiths, the established denominations charge that storefronts were disorderly and misguided. However, the opposition to mainstream churches did little to inhibit the growth of storefronts, which continued to multiply, driven by the African-American desire for independence and the quest for self-redefinition.

This nomination is also unique in that it is a rare example of an African American storefront church that survived from the 1930s and 1940s and evolved into a mainstream Harlem religious institution. Only one other Harlem congregation is believed to have succeeded its storefront origins, the East Harlem Protestant Parish, but it was a combination of three storefront parishes which formed (an offshoot of which survives today as Church of the Resurrection at 325 East 101st Street). Many other large present-day black congregations which started as modest storefront churches eventually moved into conventional church buildings. But for St. Luke AME, both the current church building at 153rd and Amsterdam Avenue and its original storefront location at 139-141 W. 126th Street, survive intact. While other storefront churches often had but a handful of dedicated worshippers, St. Luke quickly outgrew its space at 139-141 West 126th Street. According to The New Yorker article, "The average storefront church seldom had a membership of more than fifty." St. Luke demonstrated that its appeal grew a steady stream of worshippers during the 1940s.