In 1836, 27 years before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, a group of literate African American men gathered in a brick schoolhouse on South Division Street to establish the Second Baptist Society of Buffalo. This meeting led to the creation of the Michigan Street Baptist Church (MSBC) located at 511 Michigan Avenue in Buffalo, New York. The church became the city’s longest-operating African American place of worship in the city. It also served as a political hub for the African American community, hosting abolitionist meetings and acting as a final stop on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves were hidden in the basement of MSBC before being transported by boat across the Niagara River to Canada during darkness.
One of Michigan Street Baptist Church’s most important spiritual leaders, Samuel H. Davis, a pastor and brick mason from Temple, Maine, and an alumnus of Oberlin College in Ohio, moved to Buffalo from Windsor, Ontario in the late 1830s and became an early pastor of the church in 1842. He was also the Principal Teacher at the Vine Street African School across the street from the church.
In 1845, Peyton Harris, a formerly enslaved person who was now a church deacon and a successful businessman who now worked as a dry cleaner, tailor, realtor, assisted Davis and six church trustees in purchasing land for a permanent location for the church. The building, located east of downtown on Michigan Street, was completed in 1849, with Harris providing the materials for its construction and Davis doing most of the masonry work.
In 1892, Rev. Dr. Jesse Edward Nash Sr., from Occoquan, Virginia, and a graduate of Wayland Seminary in Washington, DC, became the pastor of the church. He was the most widely known and respected African American leader in Buffalo and remained in this role for 61 years. During his tenure, he brought branches of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to Buffalo.
During the Great Migration in the 1920s and 1930s, the church’s membership surged, growing from 94 to over 500. W.E.B. Dubois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D from Harvard University, was one of the many distinguished visitors and speakers at the church.
By 1962, Michigan Street Baptist Church had reached a membership of 600. Nonetheless its last service was conducted on February 24, 1962. The Church was now surrounded by secondhand clothing stores, cheap eateries, and dilapidated rooming houses. The church building was sold to the Macedonia Street Baptist Church, which occupied the space until 1975. That year, Bishop William K. Henderson, pastor of El Bethel Temple Holiness Church, purchased the property for $1.
In 2001, Bishop Henderson and other community members formed a nonprofit organization, the Buffalo Niagara Freedom Station Coalition (BNFSC), aimed at protecting and restoring the Michigan Street Baptist Church and other historic sites significant to the abolitionist and civil rights movements in Western New York. In 2022, New York’s U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer secured $500,000 to support the church’s restoration which included replacing the hardwood flooring, repainting the walls, installing new pews and carpeting in the balcony, upgrading electrical systems, adding new doors and lighting fixtures, and recreating original stenciling patterns around the upper walls of the church dating back to 1845. On January 29, 2025, the historic Michigan Street Baptist Church, officially reopened.
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Historic Michigan Street Baptist Church, https://michiganstreetbaptistchurch.org
Samuel Davis, https://www. uncrownedcommunitybuilders.com
