A Tale of Two Nations 2

Ethiopian and African-American Relations:
A Brief Timeline

by Andrew Laurence


1808

African-Americans along with a group of Ethiopian merchants are unwilling to accept racially segregated seating at the First Baptist Church of New York and withdraw their membership.

Determined that they would organize their own church, they establish the Abyssinian Baptist Church, now located in Harlem, New York. The name is inspired by the nation from which the merchants of Ethiopia had come, Abyssinia.

As the first non-segregated Baptist Church in America, it is led for many years by the great Pastor and US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. after his father Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and would serve as a focal point in New York for many of the Pan-African and civil rights movements to come.