Broadway United Church of Christ

A dispute about this led to the church leaving the Presbyterian fold, through the purchase of the building by a prominent member, editor of The Journal of Commerce, David Hale.

Members of the Amistad Committee eventually formed The American Missionary Association, an organization that opposed slavery, and established schools, colleges, and churches for freed slaves after the Civil War.

William Lloyd Garrison, a prominent abolitionist, and Frederick Douglass, a black newspaper editor and former slave, both spoke at the Church.

In 1839, Andrew Harris, the first African-American to graduate from the University of Vermont, and the sixth in the nation, delivered a speech to 5,000 members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, including this passage: If the groans and sighs of the victims of slavery could be collected, and thrown out here in one volley, these walls would tremble, these pillars would be removed from their foundations, and we should find ourselves buried in the ruins of the edifice.

The church founded a newspaper, The Independent, an anti-slavery paper that had a circulation of 15,000, which helped to spread the renown of Emily Dickinson by publishing her poems.

[10] The pastor, Joseph Parrish Thompson, deemed the event significant enough to document the final services and sermons from the day in a pamphlet, "The Last Sabbath in the Broadway Tabernacle: A Historical Discourse."

The day included sermons by Joseph Parrish Thompson, Edwards Amasa Park, and Richard Salter Storrs, as well as an anthem composed for the occasion by William Batchelder Bradbury,[12] a reading of Psalm 122 and Psalm 132 by George W. Wood (Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions), Prayer by Rev.

It also carried out educational and religious activities in the poorer neighborhoods of the City, including Hell's Kitchen, where it established a branch, the Bethany Mission, in 1868.

The City had spread beyond its former boundaries, and again a generous offer for the Church's property stimulated a move to 56th and Broadway, a corner where the streets were still unpaved.

During 1907 and 1908, pastor Jefferson presented a series of sermons at the Broadway Tabernacle on the character of Jesus to a group of young men, many students, on Sunday Evenings.

At their request, a hardbound edition of this series was published in 1936 under the title The Character of Jesus, by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.. Mission work continued to be a focus, leading among other things to the establishment of the Jefferson Academy in Tungshien, China.

One of the great public controversies of the time was the Scottsboro case, when a group of nine black men were charged with sexually molesting some white women in Tennessee.

The men were freed from prison; Chalmers was elected treasurer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in recognition of his work on the case.

Without an apparent sense of contradiction, the Church during this period continued to offer regular hospitality to members of the armed forces through its weekly canteens.

One of Broadway's staff members, Aston Glaves, became a leader in developing affordable housing in the church's neighborhood, formerly called Hell's Kitchen.

When that relationship ended, Broadway UCC took temporary residence at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew (New York City), a welcoming congregation at 86th Street with a similar mission and focus.

Ministries to churches in South Africa as it threw off apartheid, to prisoners, to people with HIV and AIDS, and to women on welfare, among others, have marked the 1990s.