African Meeting House

The African Meeting House, also known variously as First African Baptist Church, First Independent Baptist Church and the Belknap Street Church, was built in 1806 and is now the oldest black church edifice still standing in the United States. It is located in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, adjacent to the African American Abiel Smith School. It is a National Historic Landmark.

Famous quotes containing the words african, meeting and/or house:

    The African race evidently are made to excel in that department which lies between the sensuousness and the intellectual—what we call the elegant arts. These require rich and abundant animal nature, such as they possess; and if ever they become highly civilised, they will excel in music, dancing and elocution.
    Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)

    They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)