A Crusade to Praise

Deep in the woods of Setauket, for the community of Indians and African-Americans that had grown together in the years after the first slaves arrived on Long Island in the 17th Century, the options for worship were few.

One choice was to pray in churches controlled by the white families they served, such as the Caroline Church or Setauket Presbyterian. Another was to gather in the woods, at campground meetings led by itinerant preachers.

The memory and the practice of that campground worship lingered into the early 20th Century. "My grandmother and my aunts all talked about how they met in the woods, sang songs in the woods," said Theodore Green, 70, whose curiosity as a child led him to a lifelong study of the history of his family and his Setauket community.

One of his ancestors, Titus Sells, of combined Indian and African-American heritage, was born in 1772. About that time, a distant event struck the spark leading to the creation of a religious movement that would provide a new option for black communities in Setauket and across Long Island: the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1777, an itinerant Methodist preacher took the Gospel to a group of slaves in the Delaware woods. One of them was Richard Allen, 17, who had been born into a slave family once owned by a Philadelphia lawyer and later sold to a Delaware farmer. The farmer eventually sold Allen's mother and three siblings, and he never saw them again.

Allen embraced the Gospel and returned often to the woods to meet with the preacher. Later, Allen bought his freedom for $2,000 and began to preach. He gravitated to the Methodist movement, before it became a separate denomination in 1784, because its leader, John Wesley, abhorred slavery.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, slavery began losing its hold in some parts of the North. There, some slave owners didn't find it as economically crucial as it was in the South, and they took to heart the revolutionary ideology of equality.

"So they began to set their slaves free," said Lawrence Little, who teaches African-American history at Villanova University and wrote his dissertation on the African Methodist Episcopal Church. "You begin to have not large numbers but significant numbers of free black Americans. What begins to happen is you start to see racism set in."

That is what happened to Allen, after he had been invited to preach at the nation's first Methodist church, St. George's in Philadelphia. His presence built up black attendance at the predominantly white church, but the church's leaders forced black members to sit toward the back or to stand, then rejected Allen's requests for permission to start a black church.

The friction boiled over when a white church trustee asked Allen and two other black men to move from the place where they knelt in prayer at St. George's. Trustees tried to lift Allen's friends from their knees. "By this time the prayer was over," Allen recalled, "and we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued by us in the church."

Later, Allen established his own church in Philadelphia, which became known as Mother Bethel, the parent church of his movement. There, in 1816, Allen called a meeting of black churches. The delegates launched a new denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, electing Allen the first bishop.

Racism within the very walls of the church was hardly unique to Philadelphia. "The white Methodists of New York had much the same attitudes," Little said. The result of racism in New York was the creation of another denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which elected James Varick as its first bishop in 1822.

"If Varick and Allen had seen eye to eye, it would not have been a different denomination," said the Rev. Lillian Frier Webb, pastor of Mt. Olive AME Church in Port Washington. The two men differed over geographical expansion strategy. "It was not theological or doctrinal. It was just regional."

The two denominations quickly reached Long Island. Macedonia AME Church was founded in Flushing in 1811. Bethel AME Church, now in Copiague but originally in Amityville, claims to be the oldest AME congregation in Nassau and Suffolk. It started in 1814, even before the creation of the denomination itself. "In Nassau County, it runs neck and neck with Mt. Olive in Port Washington and Salem in Roslyn," Webb said.

The movement reached Setauket at about the same time that the Town of Brookhaven decided to establish a black cemetery there in 1815. "We have no deed for that first church," Green said. But he believes his godmother, Caroline Moore, 93, the oldest member of the congregation, who has told him that the first church was at that cemetery on Christian Avenue.

That church is believed to have been an AME Zion church, but it later became an AME church. The first building for which the community has records went up in 1848, at Lubber Street and Christian Avenue. In 1874, the community erected the present church, at Locust Avenue and Christian Avenue. Fire heavily damaged it and destroyed valuable records in 1909.

As it celebrates a 150th anniversary during Black History Month, the Setauket church can look back on overcoming hard times. Though the rise of industry brought manufacturing jobs to Setauket starting in the late 1800s, the low wages did not allow many blacks to buy homes. So the population was transient and the church was poor. In 1941, a fading, handwritten record shows, one week's contributions amounted to less than $3.

Providentially, the woods surrounding the church were filled with blueberries and other fruits, and the congregation used them for income. "The church sold an awful lot of blueberry pies," Green said.

Despite economic hardship, AME churches have played a crucial role in developing black leadership, starting at a time when the only place black people could vote was in church elections. "It was in the house of God where they had their first opportunity to use their talents and skills," said the Rev. Gregory Leonard, the pastor in Setauket.

The congregation is still small, about 100 people, but still essential. "This has been pretty much the only Afro-American house of worship in the Three Village area for a good little while," Leonard said. It also attracts people from Middle Island, Centereach and Selden. And Leonard sees hopeful signs for its future.

"More and more people are moving into this area -- Afro-Americans," Leonard said. "Our arms are always open."