Little Rock A.M.E. Zion Church
(ca. 1911)
The century-old Neoclassical Little Rock A.M.E. Zion Church building continues to serve one of Charlotte’s oldest Black congregations.
401 N Myers St, Charlotte, NC 28202
Little Rock A.M.E. Zion Church was founded in the early 1870s by Thomas Henry Lomax (1832-1908) in part to help recently emancipated Black Charlotteans acclimate to their new way of life. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was an antebellum North denomination that began to penetrate North Carolina’s coastal areas when Union forces occupied Beaufort and New Bern. After the war, A.M.E. Zion preachers moved inland to rally the formerly enslaved to a Christian institution entirely devoid of white influence or power. The church reached Charlotte in May 1865, when Edward H. Hill arrived to start Clinton Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church as the city’s first Black church on South Mint Street.
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A native of Cumberland County, North Carolina, Lomax arrived in Charlotte about 1873 and received his license to preach in 1867. He was assigned to Clinton Chapel where he worked feverishly between 1873 and 1876 to build upon the foundation that Hill and others had started. In addition to increasing Clinton Chapel by approximately 700 new members, Lomax established Little Rock A.M.E. Zion as the denomination’s second Charlotte church, originally located on South Graham Street between Second and Third Streets. In 1876, Lomax became a bishop, serving the church in several capacities during the decades that followed (including as a missionary to Canada) but always maintaining a strong connection with the Charlotte area. He resided in Charlotte during the final years of his life.
The Little Rock congregation purchased land at North Myers and East Seventh Streets in 1884 to construct a new First Ward house of worship. Opened in 1889, the new church proved so successful in ministering to the Black community that a larger church building was needed by 1893. Continued growth prompted S. D. Watkins (1865-1930), Little Rock’s minister from 1900 to 1906, to build a more impressive edifice for his congregation than the wooden churches in which they had previously worshipped. He decided to raise the funds to secure the services of a prominent local architect, James Mackson McMichael (1870-1944), widely regarded as one of North Carolina’s leading church architects. Reported as having designed more than 900 churches – twenty-two in Charlotte, including Myers Park Presbyterian Church, First Baptist Church (now Spirit Square), and the nearby East Avenue Tabernacle A.R.P. Church – during his 50-year career, the extant Little Rock A.M.E. Zion Church is the only known building in Charlotte that McMichael designed for a Black client. Constructed at a cost of $20,000, an amount raised entirely by the congregation, the new brick Neoclassical house of worship remains the most architecturally sophisticated of Charlotte’s older Black churches.
By the late 1970s, the Little Rock congregation again needed more room for its growing ministries. In 1980, it opened a new home across North Myers Street from, and more than double the size of, the 1911 edifice. But the congregation’s former home remained in service for the local Black community following its conversion in 1986 by the City of Charlotte into the Afro-American Cultural Center. In October 2009, the Cultural Center reopened in uptown Charlotte as the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture. Since that time, the Little Rock congregation has continued to use its former 1910 home for its ongoing missions.