History UnderfootAtlanta
  • Church & institution
  • Segregation
  • congregation from 1847
  • City of Atlanta

Big Bethel AME Church

A congregation dating to 1847, known as 'Sweet Auburn's City Hall'. It housed the Gate City Colored School, a public school for Black children, and Morris Brown College was founded there in 1881.

See it on the map All Segregation records

The record

The congregation was organized in 1847 by enslaved members of Union Church in Marthasville and joined the African Methodist Episcopal denomination in 1866. The Gate City Colored School operated in the church from 1879. Morris Brown College was founded by a resolution adopted at the AME conference meeting at Big Bethel on January 5, 1881, but its first classes opened on October 15, 1885 in a building at Boulevard and Houston streets. After a 1923 fire, members Lula B. Jones and Nellie L. Davis wrote the religious folk drama Heaven Bound to help pay for the new building; it was first staged in 1930 and has been performed every year since.

Today: An active church on Auburn Avenue west of the Downtown Connector.