For 90 years, Macedonia Baptist Church has been more than a house of worship. It has been Denver’s hearth for the burning conviction that all souls are equal.
On Sunday, Macedonia celebrated its place at the center of the civil rights movement in Denver.
Congregants remembered when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and other luminaries in the movement came to call.
“I hope we will recall and become rejuvenated spiritually,” said the church’s 86-year-old interim pastor, the Rev. Willard C. Johnson.
Macedonia Baptist, founded in 1917 in a small building at 22nd and Arapahoe streets in Five Points, sometimes called the “Harlem of the West,” would move twice, finally taking root at Adams Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard.
Whatever its location, Macedonia remained at the center of African-American causes such as fair housing practices and equality in employment. It always has a constituency larger than the 300 who come on Sundays.
And now, like its community, the church is in transition. When Johnson looks around the historically black neighborhoods surrounding Macedonia, he sees the massive influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants and of young white people eager to invest in historic old homes. It pleases him.
“I see them moving in as one of the crown jewels of our work,” said Johnson, a battle-scarred but resilient veteran of the civil rights movement.
“The elements are coming together,” he said, “but they have not really made the connections that will blend them together.”
Johnson senses relative calm as this new community takes shape, but something is missing.
“The people coming in are friendly. They are reaching out,” Johnson said. “The people here will receive them, but there’s a little reluctance to give of themselves.”
Johnson came out of retirement at age 86, and 14 years into a battle with cancer, to serve as Macedonia’s interim pastor.
Johnson serves as the church searches for a replacement for the dynamic Rev. Paul Martin, who preached his last booming sermon Feb. 25 before retiring at age 68 to Los Angeles.
Martin’s motto for the church, where he was only the 11th pastor in its 90 years, was: “On the cutting edge of history … redeeming our community.”
As for Johnson, he has known this church and community since he came to Denver as a seminary student in the mid-1950s, when African-Americans were first moving into homes between York Street and Colorado Boulevard.
They were not yet welcome east of Colorado, he said.
“We received our Christianity from white folk. They gave us what they wanted us to have,” he said. “But religion gave us hope. We took our problems to the church. We sought help from God. And then we were able to go to the streets.”
The successes of the movement, Johnson divides this way: “The Lord did that. Good white folk helped us. And we had tremendous black leaders.”
Very often, Macedonia was the meeting hall for these leaders. It gathered members of the Urban League, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality and more.
George Pugh, 77, was a member of the choir in January 1964 when King spoke here, four years before his assassination at age 39. He remembers running “to shake the hand of a great man.”
The church drew other legends, such as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, courtroom titan Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and NAACP activist Roy Wilkins.
“This was the heartbeat of the African-American community,” Johnson said.
For 21-year-old Micah Hudnall, a Macedonia congregant since the age of 4, history is found not in books but in the person sitting next to her.
“We have a lot of history right here in this church,” he said. “If you want to hear history, you can ask someone here, and they can tell you about it firsthand.”
As for the future, Johnson finds the challenges of this newly blended community no less daunting than those of the 1960s.
“We need to get rid of poverty, drugs and promiscuous sex,” Johnson said. “When people succeed, instead of running out of the community, they need to build it up. But we don’t have the sense of sacrificial service.
“Christ came and suffered for us. So some of us will have to suffer for those who come after us.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
