Dixwell UCC Marks Bicentennial

The nation’s oldest African American United Congregational Church is celebrating 200 years of being rooted in community service, social justice, and humanitarian efforts. 

The congregation, the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ (UCC) on Dixwell Avenue, is planning a Sept. 24 event at the Omni Hotel to commemorate its legacy of continuous service in the Dixwell neighborhood and beyond. The celebration was postponed for nearly three years due to the pandemic; click here for tickets. 

Longtime church members Helena Rogers, Althea Musgrove Norcott, Joy W. Donaldson, Estelle Whitfield Simpson, Clifton Graves Jr., and Antonie Thorp are members of the planning committee for the 202nd birthday celebration. 

Journalist, author, and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault will be the keynote speaker for the Sept. 24 anniversary luncheon. 

In an interview, committee members spoke of the church’s lifelong dedication to serving Dixwell, its historical civil rights grounding, and its social justice-driven approach to worship and ministry.

Then comes a homecoming service on Sept. 25. UCC General Minister and President Rev. John C. Dorhauer will offer a sermon. 

Historic trailblazers in the congregation have included George Williamson Crawford, a lawyer and civil rights activist and the first Black city corporation counsel. He was a founder of the Greater New Haven branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The celebration will honor other past congregants like Simeon Jocelyn, an abolitionist who helped to form The Amistad Committee in 1839; Ernest Saunders, an engineer who founded the Connecticut Afro-American Historical Society out of his Orchard Street home; and former president of the George Crawford Black Bar Association Alan Bowie Jr. 

Noted former congregants also included John C. Daniels, New Haven’s first Black mayor and a church deacon; inventor of the ironing board Sarah Boone; Helen Eugenia Hagan, first Black female student at the Yale School of Music; and Natalie Hardy Douglass, an original member of the first black Girl Scout troop in New Haven. 

The church played a role in important social-justice movements in New Haven, including paying for the defense in the Amistad trials, Whitfield Simpson said. 

A better-known contribution the church made to the community was the donation of the land that housed the former Dixwell Q House.

“Dixwell [UCC] from its beginning had been a anchor for its community,” Norcott said.

The church fundraised $150,000 to donate to Sierra Leone during the ebola epidemic.

The church was originally founded on Temple Street. In 1820, Black New Haveners were allowed to worship only in the balcony of the First Congregational Church, located on the New Haven Green. A group of those Black worshippers worked with white abolitionist Simeon Jocelyn to host religious services at his home. The original members included four men and 18 women, who made up the first Black congregation in New Haven.

Norcott said the 202-year celebration location at the Omni New Haven Hotel holds significance because of the church’s original location downtown. 

The church remained downtown from 1824 until 1886. Then it moved to 100 Dixwell Ave. until 1969.

Thorp, who joined the church in 1982, said its history and rooted activism made her feel supported and encouraged. 

Several of the committee congregants grew up in the Dixwell neighborhood and began attending the church at its previous location at 100 Dixwell Ave. 

Rogers, 72, recalled living on Gregory Street as a child. She would walk to the church for Sunday school. A congregant since 1952, she was raised in the church by her mother and later had her own kids join as teens. There are now four generations of Rogers family at the church. 

Rogers is now a part of the church’s women’s fellowship and co-chair of the silent auction committee. 

Norcott recalled her parents living across street from the church’s former Dixwell building. Norcott’s family have been congregants of the Dixwell church for the past 100 years. She and her husband were baptized by former Rev. Henry Curtis McDowell, as were two of her kids. She chairs the Deacon Board.

Rev. Edwin R. Edmonds’ leadership of the church for decades in the 20th century, beginning during the Civil Rights Movement, was defining for congregants like Thorp. She was inspired by Edmonds’s dedication to academic achievement and constant encouragement to speak up and ​“tell it like it was,” she said. 

This led Thorp to raise her children in the church. For decades the church has had a youth choir, early childhood center, after school programming, Friday activities for congregants and the community. 

“Dixwell was a place where you could actually come and receive that kind of support and encouragement of where to go next,” Thorp said, recalling Edmonds pushing congregants to pursue higher education. 

Donaldson said her attraction to the church was its choir, which led her to join in 1971. 

The church has also hosted HBCU choirs and the Ebony Fashion Fair in the past.

Graves joined the church at age 15 after relocating from North Carolina to New Haven. His father had close ties with Rev. Edmonds and followed him to New Haven after the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) burned a cross on the front yard of Edmonds’ home in North Carolina. 

“As a teen, the church was central part of my life,” Graves said. 

He described Edmonds and his father as a mentor who shaped his passion for civil rights. He recalled joining his two sisters in the church creative arts center as a teen and his younger brother being in the church day care. 

Graves’s father led the Dixwell Avenue Neighborhood Development Housing Cooperation, which partnered with the church to purchase dilapidated homes in the neighborhood to rent to low-income families. Graves would work summer jobs helping to clean up the homes. 

During Covid, the church conducted weekly bible studies via Zoom, Wellness Fridays via Zoom, and wellness presentations from psychiatrists, social workers, and doctors. It held Sunday services outdoors in the parking lot. (Click here to read an interview with current Rev. Frederick ​“Jerry” Street about seeking to find meaning and spiritual re-centering amid the challenges of the pandemic.) 

The committee agreed the church’s mission remains to carry on the historic traditions of social activism established by its founders. 

The anniversary event will celebrate ​“the past, the present, and look toward the future,” Norcott said. 

The church’s oldest deacon is 107 years old and remains active.

“It’s been a blessing to be wrapped around the beautiful legacy of Dixwell,” Whitfield Simpson said. ​“We’re standing on shoulders of those who had very little if anything and keeping the legacy going because of the many sacrifices that our ancestors made for us.”