Preserving a Legacy: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in Yankton
Lynda B. Schwan
South Dakota History, volume 34 number 4, 2004
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
Situated among many fine examples of late nineteenth-century architecture within the Yankton historic district is a small rectangular building with the inscription "I8 A.M.E. 85 CHURCH" above the front door. While unassuming, the structure stands as testimony to the determination of those who founded it as a congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first denomination in the United States founded and run by blacks and devoted to improving their lives.
By the time it was formally organized on 9 April 1816, the AME Church in the United States had been many years in the making. It began with the actions of a group of northern free blacks led by Richard Allen, who had originally worshiped with whites at Saint George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1786. Although the Methodist Church officially opposed slavery, an atmosphere of discrimination had crept into the congregation over the years, as whites denied blacks leadership roles, objected to African forms of worship, and forced blacks to wait for communion until whites had been served. In November 1792, when black congregants were assigned to seats in the rear of a church balcony, Richard Allen and other black members left, never to return.
Allen was a former slave who had purchased freedom from his master and gone on to careers as a shoemaker, owner of a chimney-sweeping business, and real-estate investor. At his death in 1830, his assets totaled forty thousand dollars, a sizeable fortune for any person, black or white. Allen attributed his success to the influence of Methodism, which he believed provided individuals with the discipline they needed to transform their lives and thus improve their economic and social standing. Following his departure from Saint George's, Allen sought to organize a black Methodist church. John Wesley, an Englishman, had founded the denomination, basing it on the simple but dynamic principles of conversion, personal discipline, and fellowship with other believers. Methodists professed that a conversion experience assured salvation, a state that the "reborn" individual manifested to others by adhering to a set of Christian ethics that forbade swearing, drinking, fighting, theater-going, and a number of other "sins."
Like Wesley, Allen believed that black church members would gain moral strength from fellowship with one another and benefit by learning the virtues of industry and thrift that came with self-discipline. Allen organized his first congregation, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Philadelphia in 1794. Conflict over the relationship of the black church to its parent organization, the mostly white Methodist Episcopal Church, dragged on until 1816 when the Pennsylvania supreme court declared Bethel to be independent of the authority of the larger church. Similar instances of discrimination against black church members in other northern cities prompted the formal organization of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in r8i6, with Allen as bishop.
"In the ideas of Allen and the founders of the AME Church," wrote historian Clarence Walker, "can be seen the origins of that philosophy of self-help that American historians traditionally associate with Booker T. Washington." Free blacks now had an institution where they could worship, meet socially, and educate their children. Church members were to live in accordance with the Methodist discipline of thriftiness, sobriety, and hard work and to help others to do the same. Imbued with a sense of mission, they were to minister to fellow 'Anglo Africans" as examples of "self-help and uplift." In becoming successful, they would help to "dispel the web of prejudice and hatred that surrounded black people in America." By 1840, less than a decade after Allen's death, the AME Church had spread north into New York and New England and westward to Ohio. Missionaries were also at work in Haiti. Following the Civil War, the church spread into the southern United States until it had a membership of more than three hundred thousand in 1870.
The same desire for self-betterment brought African Americans to Dakota Territory in the 1870s, and by the following decade, enough had arrived in the territory's capital of Yankton to support a congregation of the AME Church. Among the first blacks to put down roots in Yankton was Christopher Columbus {"C. C") Yancey, also known as Tom Douglass, who arrived aboard a steamboat in 1878. Situated on the Missouri River in the southeast corner of Dakota Territory, Yankton had been established in 1859 and was among the oldest non-Indian settlements in the territory. At the time of Yancey's arrival, it was an important steamboat port, serving as a supply point for United States Army posts and Indian agencies and an outfitting town for goldseekers traveling north and west to Montana and the Black Hills. Yankton was also important politically as the location of the territorial capital until 1883, when the seat of government was moved to Bismarck in the territory's northern portion.
Yancey was a freed slave whose former master had been a lawyer who had educated him well. Like many of the African Americans who lived in Yankton in the 1870s, Yancey worked on the steamboat docks. While much of the town's black population was transient, he remained in Yankton for decades, marrying Annie Saunders, a woman of German descent and fathering five sons, all of whom grew up in Yankton. Over the years, Yancey engaged in various enterprises, including operating a restaurant and saloon and manufacturing the striking machines used on carnival midways.
By the early 1880s, other blacks had established businesses and homes in Yankton with the intention of staying in the community. In November 1883, they formed an AME congregation, holding worship services in the shop of Henry Robinson, a black barber, until a church building could be constructed. Amos Lewis, who had been born in Georgia in 1840 and trained as a bricklayer under his former slave owner, is credited with building the AME church structure in 1885. It was later named the Allen Chapel after the denomination's founder, Richard Allen.
The first elected officers of the AME congregation in Yankton were Thomas Sturgiss, superintendent; Susan Graves, assistant superintendent; J. M. Rankin, secretary; Eliza Stokes, assistant secretary; Elizabeth Passons, treasurer; Louis Grant, librarian; and Clara Lovies, assistant librarian. The first pastor assigned to the congregation was Reverend G. W. Nemore, followed by T. Mudd, James Higgins, G. R. Brown, and W. H. Speace. By 1889, the congregation had twenty members, approximately one-third of Yankton's black population, and property valued at two thousand dollars.
Listed among the congregation's early members were black restaurant owners and cooks, a farmer, an engineer, an assistant druggist, the city constable, a mechanic, and several widows. Among the best known was Kate D. Chapman, who had been born in 1870 in Mound City, Illinois, and migrated with her family in the early 1880s to Yankton, where she attended Yankton High School. In 1888, the Christian Recorder, the national magazine of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published her poem "Memory." Chapman went on to study at Wilberforce University, an AME institution in Ohio, and to publish a number of poems and articles on the theme of "racial uplift."
Improving the lives of his fellow African Americans had also become a mission for C. C. Yancey, who joined with other black residents of Yankton, Pierre, and Sioux City, Iowa, in forming first the "Link Brothers" and later the "Northwestern Homestead Movement." The purpose of both organizations was to recruit and assist what was termed "the better class" of African Americans in relocating to farms in South Dakota. Beginning in 1904, Yancey traveled south to Mississippi and Missouri, encouraging those who had the means and wherevñthal to take up homesteads in the "Beulah Land" of South Dakota, where they could become landowners and improve their lot. Henry Blakey, his fiancée Mary Fristoe, and his brother Isaac Blakey of Forest Green, Missouri, heeded Yancey's call and settled in the Yankton area in 1905. In addition to becoming respected members of the community, they and their descendants held important positions in Yankton's AME church and eventually played a crucial role in its preservation.'
The church structure, located at 508 Cedar Street, was built on property deeded to church trustees Amos Lewis, A. Craves, and Washington Stokes for one dollar by Johann and Christina Bender of Hutchinson, Dakota Territory. The official dedication occurred on 11 November 1887. The building itself is a vernacular, simplified gableroof structure built on a slab foundation. Its walls are made of Yankton brick, a red brick composed of local clay, sand, and gravel. While
Yankton had a ready supply of clay due to its Missouri River location, the clay did not make a good building material. Yankton brick loses its outer layer easily and turns into powder in a relatively short time.
A short sidewalk leads to the central front doors of the Allen Chapel, above which is a two-part transom window. Centered above the transom is a sign that reads "I8 A.M.E. 85 CHURCH." The facade has no other ornamentation. Both the north and south elevations of the building have three windows. The rear of the church has a door that once led to a privy and storage area.
The church interior is also exceedingly simple. The historical features that remain today are the open floor plan, the wood floor, original church pews, piano, choir area, and altar. In 1975, the Allen Chapel was accepted for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Yankton Historic District. This five-block section runs along Fifth and Sixth streets from Mulberry to Cedar streets and contains 152 buildings, many of them homes built between 1870 and 1895 for prominent Yankton residents. Sanford B. Coulson, who headed a steamboat shipping firm, and Joseph Ward, founder of Yankton College, the territory's first private institution of higher education, both had residences in the area. In addition to the AME church, the district includes the Christian Science and Episcopal churches and Oddfellow and GAR halls.
Alterations to the AME church since its construction have been minor. The exterior was painted white in 1950, a measure that helped to slow the deterioration of the brick. An exterior chimney was removed in 2003, and the privy and storage area were backfilled. Repairs completed in 1981 were the first made in twenty-five years and included door repairs, new screen windows, and a new roof.
By the early 1980s, the number of regular worshippers had dwindled from a high of seventy to just a handful, most of them elderly. The church no longer had its own pastor but relied instead on an AME missionary pastor who visited on a regular basis. Among the congregants was Theodore ("Ted") Blakey, a son of Henry and Mary
Blakey, who had grown up in the church and hoped to keep the remaining members together long enough to hold a centennial celebration. Blakey's hopes were realized, and the church hosted centennial festivities in 1985. Following the death several years later of Blakey's
brother Ned, who served as church caretaker, the doors of Yankton's AME church closed.
As the last known surviving church member, Ted Blakey recognized the importance of the building to the history of African Americans in Yankton and South Dakota. In 2002, he investigated legal issues surrounding the property and discovered that back taxes were owed on the building. By paying off the taxes, Blakey assumed ownership of the historic property and set about to ensure its preservation. In May of 2002, Governor William J. Janldow announced the awarding of a forty-thousand-dollar South Dakota Community Development Block Grant to assist in renovating the building for use as a meeting facility and chapel for weddings and other small services. A museum and archives of African-American history were also planned. When poor health forced Blakey to curtail his activities, the United Church of Christ, led by Reverend Nelson Stone and located near the AME church on the same city block, assumed ownership of the building in July 2002. To many, the union was a natural one, for the United Church of Christ had actively worked for the emancipation of slaves since its founding in New England.
By the summer of 2004, a number of renovations to the Allen Chapel had been completed, including a twenty-two-by-twenty-threefoot addition for new heating and electrical equipment, a kitchenette, and a handicapped-accessible restroom. On 11 July 2004, Blakey and Reverend Stone joined with more than one hundred other participants in a rousing rededication ceremony for the building. The celebration at the church was among the last Blakey would attend. He died three months later, having lived long enough to see that Yankton's AME church would not be forgotten.
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.