LAFAYETTE, IN — Before Sunday, it was easy to miss the stucco two-story on Ferry Street. No longer.
Now unveiled outside Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a plaque commemorates history on the 180th anniversary of the oldest black congregation in Tippecanoe County.
With its pastel-stained windows and warm wood interior paneling, the building stands as one of Lafayette’s last landmarks of pre-Civil War African American history. For decades, that history was “not common knowledge,” said Amber Neal-Stanley, a Bethel congregant and Purdue assistant professor who presented an overview at the afternoon ceremony.
Bethel AME was organized in 1846, roughly 20 years before Purdue University was founded. It operated Lincoln School, now affordable housing, for Black children through the 1840s and 1860s, when Indiana law excluded them from public education. In 1867, Frederick Douglass delivered a nearly two-and-a-half-hour speech at Bethel that raised more than $200 for the congregation, enough to help secure the Ferry Street building still standing today.
The General de Lafayette chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution has been spearheading the recognition project since 2018. Its historian, Diana Vice, helped form the chapter’s Black history committee after discovering 18 African American soldiers in the back of Tippecanoe County’s World War 1 Gold Star book.
Crucial to the project were two recently departed advocates for that history — teacher Mary Anthrop and the Rev. Pamela Jones Horne, late pastor at Bethel — who researched and drafted the text of the memorial plaque. Horne’s son stood at the front of the crowd when the cloth dropped Sunday afternoon.
State Rep. Sheila Klinker presented her own recognition of the anniversary and introduced state secretary hopeful Beau Bayh.
After the ceremony, the Rev. Allen McClendon, an AME pastor from Anderson, Indiana, said he wants to feel hopeful but can’t call the marker more than window dressing.
“Forgetting is not healing, it’s erasing,” McClendon said. “It’s not healing until we open our eyes, recognize it, own up to it, and move forward from there.”
“Move” is the active verb of Bethel AME, according to the Rev. Mallory Tarrance, Bethel’s former pastor, and to Neal-Stanley, who said the congregation sees its educational legacy as an active obligation. With Black history under pressure in public school curricula, she said, the church functions as a protected space where that history can still be taught.
“I think the church, right now, in this moment,” Neal-Stanley said, “has a very unique role to play.”
The ceremony closed with attendees singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Oldest Black church in Lafayette gets historic honor
Reporting by Meagan Hipsky, Lafayette Journal & Courier / Lafayette Journal & Courier
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