New Bethel Baptist Church

About this property

New Bethel Baptist Church is a Baptist church located at 8430 C. L. Franklin Boulevard (also called Linwood Street) in Detroit, Michigan. It is affiliated with the National Baptist Convention, USA. Founded in 1932, the church was led by C. L. Franklin from 1946 until 1979 and was at the center of the civil rights movement in Detroit. Robert Smith Jr. has been the pastor since 1982. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. The church was founded March 6, 1932. V. L. Bolton was the first pastor and was followed by Horatius "H.H." Coleman (1932–1935), N. H. Armstrong (1935–1940) and William E. Ramsey (1940–1946). In May 1946, C. L. Franklin became the pastor. When Franklin became pastor, the congregation had 400 members and met in a bowling alley at Willis and Hastings. In October 1951, the church moved into a new church, built at a cost of $250,000 with a seating capacity of 2,500, at 4210 Hastings Street in Detroit. In the 1950s, New Bethel became known for its gospel choir which had weekly radio broadcasts. Participants included Franklin, music director Thomas Shelby, and Franklin's daughter Aretha Franklin. James Cleveland served as organist and sometimes conductor in the early 1950s. In 1956, a 14-year-old Aretha Franklin made her first recordings for J-V-B Records at New Bethel. In 1961, the church lost its Hastings Street building to construction of the Chrysler Freeway. The church, which had 4,000 members at the time, moved to the Gold Coast Theater (8210 Twelfth) for the next two years. On March 10, 1963, the church moved to the previously dilapidated Oriole Theater at the corner of Linwood and Philadelphia in Detroit. Detroit architect Nathan Johnson oversaw the remodeling which cost more than $500,000. The project was Detroit's "first major all-Negro building project", using an architect, contractors, and financing from the African-American community. The Detroit Free Press described the new structure as follows: "The row of glass doors at the entrance and the vast expanse of whiteness inside gives one the feeling of entering a miniature Cobo Hall." More than 2,000 persons participated in a procession of cars from the temporary home at the Gold Coast Theater to the new site. At the time, Franklin described the trip as a "trip from the valley to the mountain." In May 1963, Franklin was elected chairman of the Detroit Council of Human Rights and petitioned Detroit's Common Council for permission to conduct a march that became known as the Detroit Walk to Freedom. The group also adopted the "Declaration of Detroit" noting that 30% of Detroit's population was African-American, yet 70% of the city's African-Americans lived in substandard housing. The Detroit Walk to Freedom, planned by Franklin and members of New Bethel, took place on June 23, 1963. The protest had 125,000 persons, was the largest civil rights demonstration in the country's history to that point, and culminated in a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. at Cobo Hall.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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