[3] It was organized because the white Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church required black parishioners to sit in the galleries.

[5] It was the second largest African-American church in the District of Columbia and supported enlisting black men into the Union Army when Reverend Henry McNeal Turner was pastor.

Meeting attendees included women and men, including Frederick Douglass, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Owen Lovejoy, B. F. Wade, Wendell Phillips, Owen Lovejoy, and Joshua R. Giddings.

H. M. Turner was made the chairman of a group to plan recruitment of colored troops for the Civil War.

[7] See also Camp Greene and 1st United States Colored Infantry Regiment In 1870, the white Methodist Episcopal Church met to organize a black denomination called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME).