timothy m. rainey ii.
breathe
cohort. 2024-25
project. Breathe: A Story of Race, Religion, and Justice in South Minneapolis Told through Black Church Archives
location. Minneapolis, MN
medium. exhibit
The Black Church Archives Project (BCAP) responds to the need to increase efforts to preserve the records and archives of historic African American Churches in the United States. A digital humanities project at its core, this work focuses on collecting vital records held by African American churches in North America founded since the eighteenth century that include letters, photos, recordings, ephemera, minutes, correspondences, scrapbooks, and sermons. BCAP acknowledges that African American congregations are retainers of historical assets with civic, cultural, economic, and political import, boasting a range of applications that would benefit scholarly agendas and community projects. Such records are rarely preserved, organized, and made accessible. Much less are they used as the primary data for projects in traditional and public scholarship. The present work, "Breathe: A Story of Race, Religion, and Justice in South Minneapolis Told Through Black Church Archives," builds on the aims of BCAP and demonstrates how community stories can be crafted using the records of black congregations.
This project includes a digital archive, oral history, and a documentary. The featured film, Breathe: A Black Church Story, focuses on a single congregation located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. First organized in 1880, St. Peter's African Methodist Episcopal Church has been a pillar of South Minneapolis, a flagship of the Minnesota AME Church, and a mainstay in African American politics, activism, education, and social life within the Twin Cities. While there is potential to cull multiple stories from St. Peter’s collection, this documentary follows a singular thread that begins thirty miles southeast of its current location on the edge of the Mississippi River in Hastings, Minnesota. John Wallace, an ancestor of current St. Peter’s members, escaped from slavery in Virginia, arriving in Minnesota with the Third Minnesota Regiment of the Union Army in 1862, and became a resident of Hastings. His wife, Nancy, would later join him, with both appearing on the 1870 census.
John Wallace was one of the city's most well-known black citizens. He helped found Brown's Chapel AME Church in 1890 holding the first meeting of the congregation in his home.[1] Sunday, October 17, 1892, Brown's Chapel opened on 5th and Sibley streets in the old German Baptist Church. This independent religious body was the centerpiece of an emerging class of free black citizens in Hastings including barbers, laborers, and washerwomen. Misfortune struck on the night of November 1, 1907, however, when the church was suddenly burned. Decades after the razing of Brown's Chapel, the advancement of Jim Crow-like policies, and the gradual exodus of African Americans, residents in Hastings had virtually forgotten about the burgeoning black community. This was so until a late nineteenth-century photo of the congregation was discovered and published in the Hastings Gazette on September 2, 1949, sparking interest in the city's black past.
Image of Brown's Chapel congregation reprinted in Hastings Star Gazette (August 4, 2005)
It was published again in the Hastings Star Gazette on August 4, 2005. The above image is a photocopy of the print story and is included in a binder within St. Peter's archives. Local archivists have unsuccessfully attempted to locate the original photo. Still, its 1949 reproduction continues to center discourse around memorialization efforts, reconciliation events, and generate interest in African Americans who lived in Hastings. The documentary begins with Brown's Chapel to demonstrate how religious cultures are threaded through histories of migration, generational legacies, the vagaries of racial politics, and the reshaping of black communities due to phenomena like gentrification.
Viewers can search the item numbers printed on the bottom left-hand corner of images within the digital archive to learn more about the particular items.
Breathe follows the descendants and relatives of John Wallace (in particular, the McMoore family) to Minneapolis, where they became members of St. Peter's AME Church. The oral histories and records of this congregation inform the documentary, but the copy of an archival note in their collection anchors the film. The note documents an oral confession heard by self-proclaimed Hastings historian Hazel Jacobsen years after Brown's Chapel AME burned in 1907, and it provides details on what happened that night. While some contend that the burning was a childhood prank, black citizens experienced it as racially motivated intimidation, prompting several of them to migrate to Minneapolis and St. Paul. The Hastings Democrat and The Hastings Gazette reported on the act of arson, but the police never investigated the matter. The note, which is now part in held by St. Peter's AME Church, provides an archival beginning to a narrative of religious agency woven through experiences including slavery, antiblackness, migration, church planting, community upbuilding, and responses to racial injustices up to the 2020 murder of George Floyd – who died just blocks away from where St. Peter's currently stands.
"FROM THE VERBAL RECOLLECTIONS OF HAZEL JACOBSEN"
Brown's Chapel offered a sacred home, refuge, and meeting place for black migrants who were formerly enslaved. The Wallace family connection to the AME Church continued through descendants of the Hastings pioneers, most notably through Rebecca Elsie McMoore, the granddaughter of John Wallace. Graduating from Hastings High School in 1912 and moving to South Minneapolis the same year, Elsie, according to her grandson, Greg McMoore, immediately joined St. Peter's AME upon her arrival. A lifelong resident of Minneapolis and proud South Minneapolitan, Greg continues to attend and serve his family church. When I began compiling a list of congregations in 2022 for BCAP Minnesota, St. Peter's was first on my list. I called the church office in the early spring of that year. When the administrator answered, she immediately and glowingly identified Greg McMoore as the de facto church historian. After reaching out to him the same day, we scheduled lunch at Revival restaurant for chicken and beer and began a friendship.
Gregory McMoore is a former detention center case worker and recent Author C. McWatt Fellow at the Hennepin History Museum, where he completed "Southside Stories: Our North Star Journey." In recent years, he has emerged as a prominent local historian and researcher on Black South Minneapolis as it was before and after the fateful raising of the I-35W corridor, which cut through their neighborhood. Providing rich details regarding St. Peter's and the ways the life of the church was intimately intertwined through the community surrounding 38th Street and Fourth Avenue, his insights unlocked the dynamic ways church histories help map the social networks connecting community, city, and state landscapes. Our conversations progressed quickly but carefully. As I was an outsider to St. Peter's, Greg McMoore only gradually began bringing documents to our meetings. As our comfort with one another grew, he started sharing fascinating materials. We met several times for lunch and he brought items such as newspaper clippings, pictures of late 19th century southern migrants to Minneapolis, stunning photos of black women and men in fine suits, dresses, and hats, letters and postcards illuminating the lives they built, and documents recording how African American religious communities emerged in the Upper Midwest in the late Nineteenth Century.
Greg McMoore in St. Peter's AME Church Library (2022)
1939 Photo of St. Peter's congregation at the 22nd St. and Washington Ave. location taken on their 55th anniversary | (reprinted in St. Peter’s AME Church 135th anniversary booklet, 2015)
St. Peter's is one of three historic AME churches in Minnesota, standing prominently alongside St. Mark in Duluth (1890) and Mother St. James in Minneapolis (1863). The story of Minnesota is incomplete without discussing the growth of the AME, the village of St. Anthony (the earliest municipal unit of what would become the city of Minneapolis) where residents formed St. James, the first black religious organization in the state, or Pilgrim Baptist Church in St. Paul (the first Baptist church in the state) and its famous founder and pastor, Robert Thomas Hickman.[2]
In addition to expanding what is known about early African American communities in Minnesota, the importance of making St. Peter's records more accessible is the impact it would have locally. This congregation is essential to understanding the E. 38th Street Corridor in South Minneapolis, regarded by many during the mid-twentieth century as the Black Wall Street of Minneapolis. This community blossomed with businesses, religious bodies, and social clubs. During the second half of the 20th century, St. Peter's was a cornerstone of the neighborhood with many of its members involved in politics, business, activism, and education.
Sharon Sayles Belton, the African American and first woman to become the mayor of Minneapolis, grew up in South Minneapolis and had strong ties to St. Peter's. Well-known artist Kenneth C. Green was a member of St. Peter's and produced a sixteen-panel mural of Bible stories currently on display in the church's sanctuary. The records of this congregation teem with evidence of the vibrancy of the streets, dance halls, and sports. Greg affectionately and whimsically recalled men rolling out of the Nacirema Club and right into church service when eventful Saturday nights spilled into Sunday mornings. The history of the church is deeply woven into the history of the community, and this project aims to capture this dynamism through the medium of digital humanities.
Image of the Nacirema Club on Fourth Avenue
Coach Bill McMoore (father of Greg McMoore) pictured with youth football team
At the heart of Breathe is the core conviction that the records African Americans produce and retain regarding religious life in black America, in particular, are fundamental to telling the story of religion in America, in general. The resources and records grounding the film include elements of oral history, interviews, photos, archival objects, and video recordings acquired during site visits.
Like many historic African American congregations located in urban centers in the United States, St. Peter's currently contends with the realities of how to continue thriving with a congregation that is aging and a community that is gentrifying. Greg McMoore believes that digitizing projects like BCAP have the potential to preserve the history and make it come alive for younger generations. How the project might perform historical and restorative work remains uncertain, but his will to believe in the possibility is hopeful. At the very least, I understand digital archiving among historic black churches as a mode of knowledge production shaped by correlating memories and modes of memorialization on digital platforms. Digital spaces are beneficial inasmuch as they enable often small and underfunded churches to publish their records, widely disseminate them, and curate those materials as authoritative accounts of civic, local, and national histories. Conceiving of knowledge in this way redresses epistemic legacies rooted in significations of African and black pasts as inconsequential to human progress. The potential of the Black Church Archives Project is that community members and scholars can use the materials to build future works that will be critical to producing black religious histories.
notes.
[1] The Hastings Gazette, March 10, 1900; “A New Church” in The Hastings Gazette, October 11, 1890; and “Blacks in Hastings,” 10.02, Dakota County Administration Center, Pioneer Room (Historical Records).
[2] June Drenning Holmquist, ed. They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State’s Ethnic Groups (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1981).
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Citation: Rainey II, Timothy. “Breathe: A Story of Race, Religion, and Justice in South Minneapolis Told through Black Church Archives." SPIRIT HOUSE: A Crossroads Project. August 2025. Date Accessed. https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/rainey.
Tim Rainey received his Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at Emory University, where he concentrated in American Religious Cultures. His research focuses on religion, race, and economy in the Black Atlantic world and he gives particular attention to the ways corporations interacted with Black faith communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He holds a B.A. in religious studies from Morehouse College and an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary.
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