2025 Theses Doctoral

Crucible of a Freedom Church: Building Culture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, 1790s-1920s

Caldwell, Charlette

This study examines how cultural, economic, and political conditions affected the building culture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church from the 1790s to the 1920s. Although scholarly discourse has highlighted the immense role the AME Church played in the creation of the modern-day Black Church, architectural historians are beginning to fully appreciate the connection between this institution’s building history and the ontological evolution of Blackness and perceptions of such in the United States.

By reading primary material created by AMEs alongside reviewing secondary material focused on the religious, sociological, and political history of the AME Church, I look to unearth how Black Church building embodied issues of class, identity, and respectability amongst the AMEs. This work acknowledges that the AME culture of building formed within a crucible marred by the vestiges of slavery, violence, and discrimination against Black Americans in the United States. As such, by complicating racialized minorities as architectural protagonists reacting to their material conditions, this architectural narrative explores Protestant architectural trends in several key AME Church building projects and AME print culture centered on expanding the church, while also challenging racist assumptions about Black people through building and design.