Unearthing the Untold Story:
Part I — Friendship Baptist Church: Where Faith Meets the Work
I want to begin not with a headline, but with a memory.
In 1978, I was seven years old, growing up in Harlem. Pastor Coleman, then pastor of New Pilgrim Baptist Church—formerly located at 145 West 131st Street—baptized me. Our church did not have a baptismal pool, so I was baptized across the street at Friendship Baptist Church.
At the time, I did not know that the ground beneath my feet was sacred beyond my own salvation story. I did not realize that the same neighborhood that shaped my faith had also helped shape the moral imagination, organizing strategy, and national vision of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Harlem was home, and Friendship was part of that home.
But history has a way of revealing itself when we slow down and pay attention.
Friendship Baptist Church is more than a sanctuary on West 131st Street. It is a living witness. During the mid-twentieth century, it stood among a network of Harlem institutions where faith and freedom met—in planning rooms, pulpits, and private correspondence.
It is well documented that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Friendship Baptist Church in Harlem. In 1954, Rev. Dr. Thomas Kilgore Jr., then pastor of Friendship, wrote directly to Dr. King following one such visit, affirming their relationship, shared struggle, and the interconnectedness of Black religious leadership across regions.
This is how the movement grew—not only through marches and microphones, but through churches that held people, ideas, and courage long before the cameras arrived.
That lineage continues today. Rev. Dr. James A. Kilgore, senior pastor of Friendship Baptist Church for twenty-five years and President of the Baptist Ministers’ Conference of Greater New York & Vicinity, carries forward a legacy of faith-rooted public witness. He is also my pastoral mentor—one more thread woven into a Harlem that refuses to break.
What began for me as a childhood baptism, I now understand as an initiation into a much larger story—one Harlem has been telling quietly for generations.
Part II — Harlem Headquarters: The Community That Planned a Nation’s Demand
If Friendship Baptist Church was part of Harlem’s spiritual infrastructure, then just a few steps away stood its strategic nerve center.
In the summer of 1963, a rowhouse at 170 West 130th Street became the National Headquarters for planning the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest civil rights demonstration in American history at that time.
This is not speculation. It is documented history.
From this Harlem address, A. Philip Randolph, the march’s principal architect, and Bayard Rustin, its chief organizer, coordinated the logistics that would move hundreds of thousands of people to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The headquarters was a place where phones rang, volunteers came and went, press briefings were held, and strategy was debated and refined.
Harlem did not simply inspire the movement culturally; it organized it.
On August 28, 2023, 170 West 130th Street was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That designation matters—not because it labels a building, but because it anchors truth. This neighborhood helped plan one of the most pivotal events in American history.
It is imperative that we set the record straight. While many individuals associated with the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom played critical roles, this site’s significance lies in its function as the march’s planning headquarters in Harlem. This story is dedicated to the people who labored here, the community that sustained them, and the city that made such organizing possible.
Harlem was not a support unit. It was a command post.
Part III — Why This Matters Now: Telling Our Story Before It’s Told for Us
History does not disappear; it gets neglected. History is kind to those who are kind to history. When we fail to tell our own stories, others will tell them for us—often incompletely, sometimes inaccurately, and occasionally in ways that disconnect struggle from community.
That is why this matters now.
Harlem is often remembered for its music, its art, and its renaissance. But it must also be remembered for its infrastructure of liberation—its churches, its organizers, and its rowhouses turned into war rooms for justice.
As Rev. Dr. C. Vernon Mason, Minister-in-Residence at Friendship Baptist Church and one of my longtime mentors, reminds us:
“We have a sacred, divine responsibility to tell our stories. If we don’t, nobody will.”
—Rev. Dr. C. Vernon Mason
This is that telling.
From a pulpit on West 131st Street to a planning headquarters that helped change America, Harlem’s story is not peripheral to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—it is central to it.
And this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as we honor Dr. King’s life and legacy, let us also celebrate the places and people that made his work possible. Let us remember that before the march reached Washington, it passed through Harlem.
Some of us were baptized here. All of us are responsible for what we do with the truth.
—Rev. Dr. Derrick Shahem Johnson Sr.
Sources & Further Reading (Selected)
- New York Amsterdam News — Friendship Baptist Church history and Dr. King’s Harlem connections
- The King Institute at Stanford University — Correspondence between Rev. Dr. Thomas Kilgore Jr. and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- The New York Times — “The 1963 March on Washington Changed America. Its Roots Were in Harlem.”
- National Park Service — “The Places of Bayard Rustin” and National Register of Historic Places documentation
