4400 Mt. Elliott Street
Ebenezer Baptist Church, Greater St. Peters A.M.E. Zion Church
Ebenezer Baptist Church was founded in 1898 at 3901 Moran Street near the present-day Faygo Plant on Gratiot. By 1906, the congregation had constructed a new house of worship at the corner of Canfield and Mt. Elliott, pictured here. John C. Stahl Jr. designed the structure, and the basement was said to “contain a warm air furnace, kitchen, dining room, and a boys’ gymnasium.”
I haven’t found much on the early years of this church. It was a German Baptist Church, so much of the reporting on the congregation was likely in Geman newspapers. This portion of Detroit’s East Side was heavily German in the early 1900s, initially settled by German farmers, but that started to change in the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1943 and 1944, the church was advertising its Sunday services in the paper, often under the stewardship of Pastor George A. Lang.
By 1949, the Ebenezer Baptist Church had moved again, and Greater St. Peters A.M.E. Zion Church had moved into their former church at 4400 Mt. Elliott Street. Ebenezer Baptist eventually became Grace Community Church and still meets at 21001 Moross as of 2025.
St. Peters AME Zion Church dates back to at least the 1930s. In 1937, Reverend Clinton M. Metcalf was appointed church pastor. The church was previously located at 3056 Yemans Street in Hamtramck. Reverend Metcalf was heavily involved in bettering the lives of black Detroiters from the start, working to get better housing for those moving to Detroit and Hamtramck in the 1930s.
Whereas the German Baptist church saw little coverage in the Detroit Free Press, so did the AME Zion Church that replaced it. Black Detroiters frequently looked to different papers for their news, and the Detroit Tribune and Michigan Chronicle wrote about Greater St. Peter’s.
From the jump, the church was on the pulse of race relations in Detroit. In 1953, the church hosted the first annual Human Rights Awards at the Gotham Hotel, an iconic hotel that catered to black Detroiters when others wouldn’t. Nineteen awards were given to Detroiters for their efforts to “better city race relations.” Among the awardees was Max Rosenbaum of Max’s Jewelry Store.
In February 1954, the Detroit Tribune called Greater St. Peter AME Zion Church one of Detroit’s largest and most influential churches. Under the stewardship of Reverend Metcalf, things would continue to grow.
In 1954, Reverend C. M. Metcalf made headlines when he accused the Checker Cab Company of discriminating against black Detroiters, failing to give them rides in favor of whites. This was relevant because the Checker Cab Company attempted to merge with the Radio Cab Company, two of the larger firms in the city.
Detroit had 1310 cab licenses at the time, and 901 were Checker cabs. The Radio Cab Company operated 173 more. The merger would have resulted in 1074 of the city’s 1310 cabs under one company, or around 82%. Reverend Metcalf believed that granting “a virtual monopoly to a company whose past record shows a refusal of service to 16 percent of the City’s population is unthinkable.” Additionally, the Checker Cab Company was nonunion, whereas the Radio Cab Company was represented by Teamsters Local 902, and some viewed this as a union-busting gig by management. Checker Cab officials refuted that their practices were racist or anti-union.
In April 1954, 291 individual cab owners in the Checker Cab Company voted down the proposal, and the merger was dead, likely to Reverend Metcalf’s approval.
In September 1955, the church hosted a speaker that drew more than a thousand Detroiters, according to the Detroit Free Press. The main event was Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till. Her 14-year-old son, whom she had sent to spend time with family over the summer of 1955 in Money, Mississippi, was brutally tortured, mutilated, and murdered by white men after he was said to have accosted a white woman running a grocery store with his cousins. His murder may never have made national news, but his mother, Mamie Till, insisted that he have an open-casket funeral.
Emmett’s picture was displayed on the front page of newspapers across the country, and this action has been accredited as a rung on the ladder to end Jim Crow practices in the South and a booster for the Civil Rights Movement. Emmet was murdered on August 28, 1955, and his mother spoke at the church pictured here a month later, on September 28. She was quoted in the Detroit Free Press, “I knew then [when the verdict was read] that this was something I couldn’t do myself or you by yourself. It will take all of us…No one is seeking violence or to overthrow the government. Every time we speak for freedom, someone seems to think we are trying to overthrow the country.” While in Detroit, she also spoke at King Solomon Baptist Church.
In March 1958, Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., father of the man who would orchestrate the Walk to Freedom in Detroit and give the first version of his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, appeared at St. Peters AME Zion Church. MLK, Sr. was pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Funnily enough, that was the original name of the church he visited in Detroit.
Rosa Parks spoke here in 1959. By this point, Rosa and Raymond Parks were full-time Detroit residents.
I last found mention of Clinton Metcalf as the reverend at St. Peters AME Zion Church in 1960. He may have later been the reverend at the Free Christian Community Church and was often in the paper advocating for Detroiters’ rights.
In 1966, the pastor was listed as J. W. Wells. The congregation wasn’t one of Detroit’s largest anymore, but the church continued to chug on.
By 1990, the pastor was Reverend Tyler Seldon, who had a big problem.
In March, someone chained and locked the doors to the church in an attempt to keep the pastor out. He blamed the incident on a couple of dissidents, claiming, “We don’t have any problem here.” Unfortunately for Seldon, the problems were about to get worse.
In August, around 25 long-time church members were picketing outside the church, hoping to oust Seldon from the pulpit. Their signs read “God Wants His Church Back” and “On The Battlefield For My God,” according to the Detroit Free Press. They were upset that the pastor was disconnected from the parishioners. Apparently, he hadn’t asked for advice on how a $7,000 church fund should be spent and that he had painted parts of the church when congregation members preferred aluminum siding instead. Additionally, he frowned on the old-timers’ habit of “speaking out during services” and kicked many of them off key church committees. The Detroit Free Press called the reverend, who said that they were simple dissenters and that “they can say whatever they want to say. I’m not going to dignify it by commenting on it.”
I’m unsure what happened to Reverend Tyler Seldon; however, the church is still operational today. The structure appears in sound shape and overlooks a large urban meadow where homes, businesses, and Williams School stood for decades.
Greater St. Peters AME Zion Church has served the neighborhood for generations, and hopefully, it will continue to do so.
