Touring the Michigan Street Baptist Church with Bishop William Henderson

Cars whiz by on Michigan Street as Bishop William Henderson explains the importance of the steps that originally led into Buffalo’s historic Michigan Street Baptist Church. Apart from the vehicular transients, not a soul can be seen in the immediate area.

“My plans, my desires, my dreams, is that we can take this thing [the vestibule] down, and bring back the original façade of the church, so that it will have great historical integrity,” Henderson says.

Then he takes us inside.

Henderson’s Light of the World congregation has owned and maintained the Michigan Street Baptist Church since 1974. The building, which has stood intact since 1846, was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad for many fugitive slaves before they crossed the Niagara River into Canada. “This place is not only valuable to black history, it’s something, a memorial, to the history of Buffalo,” Henderson says. “And not only that, to national history.”

Much of the church’s interior is not original. The hanging light fixtures cannot be more than a decade old; the pews were donated by St. Columba-Brigid Roman Catholic Church after a fire and refurbished, and false wood paneling covers much of the walls. Yet one cannot deny the sense of history that the church evokes.

Henderson points up to a section of the ceiling above the balcony. A small recessed door on the right half of the ceiling leads to an attic. “This church, if they had found any [fugitive salves], would have been torn down, the pastor would have been jailed and spent six months in jail, plus paying a heavy fine. He and his board.”

The building has been an important symbol for the African-American community in the region for reasons beyond its role in the Underground Railroad. It has been a forum where free and open discussions regarding race, class, and social structure have been conducted from the time it was built right through to today.

On September 20, Henderson gave a lecture, part of the Nash Lecture Series, regarding the church’s role in the civil rights movement.

Stephanie Phillips, a professor of law at the University at Buffalo, was in attendance. Phillips has a unique tie to the church. “In 1954 my father was called to be the pastor of the Michigan Street Baptist Church,” she says. Her father, Reverend Porter W. Phillips, Jr., was instrumental in engaging the church and his congregation in the civil rights movement. “Like Martin Luther King, Jr., my father was trained in the Social Gospel tradition, and believed that it was the obligation of the church to work for social justice.”

Michigan St. Baptist Church (photo by Rose Mattrey)

Percell Duggers, an African-American Studies student at the University at Buffalo who also attended Henderson’s lecture, says, “The church for minorities, specifically people of color, is a place of profound significance, as it is a direct conduit to educate one in black history.”

Henderson enlightened listeners to the many changes that took place in Buffalo during those turbulent years of the 1950s and 1960s, and how they affected both the Michigan Street corridor and the city as a whole. “Bishop Henderson’s remarks included an allusion to a disgraceful and too little known episode in Buffalo’s racial, political and economic history,” Phillips says. “The deliberate destruction of the thriving African-American community in the environs of William Street between Michigan and Jefferson, under cover of so-called ‘urban renewal.’”

The venerable Henderson’s enthusiasm never wavered during his speech. Duggers was struck, he says, by Henderson’s honesty. “He spoke from his heart.”

Henderson was born in a house at the corner of Clinton and Michigan and spent most of his early life in that neighborhood. Before 1963 the neighborhood was mostly Jewish and African American. Henderson describes the neighborhood as “a very viable, workable place. We had these buildings. I can see them by vision. Cleaners, dry-good stores, grocery stores, ice cream parlors, drug stores. I tell you, William Street was a roaring street. It was very, very busy.”

It was in 1963, Henderson recalls, that the work began to dry up, causing some families to move to other neighborhoods. When no one purchased the vacated properties, the city launched a new redevelopment policy that was then fashionable in waning Northeastern cities and is eerily related to some of today’s housing policies in Buffalo. The city began an urban renewal project, knocking down vacant houses and letting the land sit empty. “They just came through and said, ‘We’re just gonna tear this down in the talk of urban renewal,’ when it was urban demolition,” Henderson says.

City planners were indiscriminate as to which properties they destroyed, and some of the great historical landmarks of the neighborhood fell victim. “It’s a shame that Buffalo did not see the historical value of many of the buildings that they just demolished,” Henderson says.

After he’d explained the long history of the church its area of worship, Henderson guides us to the basement. Behind a curtain in the bathroom, which is not original, Henderson reveals to us a small, dark space. “Nothing but a dirt floor, the stone wall,” Henderson says. “It was a false wall that we could move out when we heard that bounty hunters were coming.”

Bishop William Henderson (photo by Rose Mattrey)

The tiny space is where people who were not well enough to climb into the attic or go out into the neighborhood were hidden when bounty hunters searched for fugitive slaves. It is wedged under the back stair and has a drainpipe running directly through it. One can hardly imagine what it must have been like to remain completely silent in such claustrophobic conditions for hours at a time.

“If a rat were to run across their feet they couldn’t holler,” Henderson says. “They couldn’t whisper, they couldn’t sneeze, they couldn’t cough.”

While the shuttering of the grain and steel mills have long since depleted Buffalo’s job market, one resource that Buffalo is not at all short on is history. Cultural and historical tourism is, according to its cheerleaders, a $100 billion industry and growing consistently. Kevin Cottrell is the owner/operator of Motherland Connextions, a company that gives tours of Underground Railroad stops and other sites historically significant to the Niagara Movement. “African-American cultural tourism makes up for $41 billion, approximately half of that figure,” Cottrell says. As one of the fastest-growing industries in the nation, cultural and historical tourism could be a lucrative boon to this heritage-packed town. “It’s time to take this to the market,” Cottrell says. “It has been for some time.”

Henderson’s church has had visitors from all over the globe, often showing up unannounced. Cottrell, too, speaks of a global market. “I’ve had people from Japan. They came in and filmed the tour and put it on Japanese TV.”

Last August the state legislature passed a bill to “establish the Commission on Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor in an effort to provide governance, oversight, sustainability and expansion of the targeted historic area for purposes of preservation, tourism and enhanced economic development opportunities for the City of Buffalo and Western New York.”

The Michigan Street Baptist Church is not the neighborhood’s only attraction. The Nash House and the Colored Musicians Club help to make what has been dubbed the Michigan Street Heritage Corridor a history-saturated corner of a shrinking city. The commission called for by the state is responsible for the Michigan Street Baptist Church, the Nash House, the Colored Musician’s Club, the home of Mary B. Talbert, and the Little Harlem Night Club.

“We want to use the funds that we get from time to time to keep this place in proper order,” Henderson said.