5759 30th Street
St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic School, St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church, Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church Annex, Greater Rock Missionary Baptist Church
(This address includes 5759—5767 30th Street)
Benedict the Moor, the friar from 16th century San Fratello in modern-day Italy, was canonized in 1807 and has become the namesake of numerous black catholic churches across the globe.
Three hundred thirty-eight years after his death, in 1927, St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church was organized in Detroit at the hands of Reverend Norman A. DuKette, the first black catholic priest in Detroit and one of the first dozen in North America.
Reverend DuKette was born in Washington, D.C., and was one of 26 children. At some point, he would relocate to Detroit and study at colleges in Iowa and Minnesota before coming home to the Motor City. In 1927, he was put in charge of the former Mt. Olive Evangelical Lutheran Church, which the Archdiocese of Detroit had purchased to create St. Benedict the Moor Catholic. The church was at 5781 Beechwood Street, a five-minute walk from the structure pictured here. We’ll get to that, though.
Under DuKette’s leadership, the church would double in size, and he would baptize over 100 people. However, under two years after taking the helm, DuKette was set to move up to Flint to start a new parish. Families that frequented St. Benedict were heartbroken; the pastor was beloved. However, DuKette’s time in Detroit hadn’t been all good.
In 1927, after attending a play at the University of Detroit, DuKette tried to go to a pharmacy to get some medicine. The shop was closed, but a passing Police Officer didn’t trust his intentions and took him to a service station to call a Detroit Police Wagon. Confident of his innocence and worried about what might happen to him, a black man, in Detroit Police custody, he slipped out the door and ran. The officer chased him and eventually shot him in the leg. DuKette spent a few days in the hospital and, to my knowledge, was never charged with a crime. Upon his arrival in Flint, he founded Christ the King Church, a parish that still exists.
Even without DuKette, St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church pushed onward. On July 15, 1951, at 3:30 PM, groundbreaking rites were held for a new 10-room school at 30th and Cobb, pictured here. Reverend Father Charles J. Diehl was in charge of the church and school at the time. It was expected to be ready at the start of the 1952 school year.
By this point, the neighborhood surrounding the church and school had become an epicenter for black culture and life in Detroit. Numerous black churches held mass, and it had one of the highest concentrations of black-owned businesses in the city. Churches like New Light Baptist eventually outgrew the neighborhood and had to move to larger buildings. It’s safe to say that the area was generally healthy.
In 1957, the Detroit Free Press ran a piece about the willingness and stubbornness of some churches on the idea of integration. As the article explains, many whites had started fleeing for the suburbs by this point. Whether it was the onset of changing neighbors due to the Great Migration, jobs already leaving the city, or the promise of more land in the suburbs, Detroit was changing, and the churches that once were full of whites weren’t sure what to do. The article continued, “Shall the church sell its structure and follow its white parishioners or stay to serve its changing neighborhood?” I wrote about a similar issue for my piece on the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant.
The article also mentions St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Parish, stating that although it was a black parish, it had numerous white worshippers. It was also noted that no black Catholic churches had been established for 40 years.
In 1958, the Detroit Free Press ran a story on Sister Mary Christiana, who had taught in Detroit for 50 years. She spent 40 years at San Francesco School, teaching primarily Italian students. The school closed and was later demolished, and Sister Mary Christiana moved to teach at St. Benedict the Moor School, where she would retire in 1960. She died on August 31, 1963, at 77.
In 1967, then-principal Sister Pierre was set to be transferred after spending six years at St. Benedict the Moor School. During her tenure, she helped to create a collection of black history books in the school library, which was open to the public. After school graduation that June, the students and staff held a surprise party to celebrate her time there.
In 1970, the Archdiocese of Detroit sold the church building at 5781 Beechwood, and the congregation moved to have services inside the school. At some point, the school had stopped operating. There was an apartment on the second floor for the priest, and classrooms were used for various things or left empty. In the late 1970s, there was a Montessori Child Care Center inside. It cost $32 a week and also accepted Department of Social Services tickets. In 2023, that’s roughly $120 a week.
On March 31, 1980, America’s oldest black Catholic priest died. Norman A. DuKette, 89, passed away at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Flint, where he had lived since leaving Detroit. Ella Coleman, a parishioner at his church for decades, said, “He helped the poor…I was a widow at the time, and he helped my little boy go to college. He was a very good priest, and he was liked by everybody.” A few years later, his former parishioners fought to have him canonized in the Catholic Church; however, their efforts failed. There is much more information online about DuKette because of this push, which is a silver lining of their actions.
In 1988, the Archdiocese of Detroit planned to close and merge dozens of churches across Metro Detroit. Population loss was hitting the city hard, and many opulent places of worship it owned were starting to show signs of age. One of the churches on the list to close was St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church, which was still located inside its former parochial school.
The farewell mass for the parish may have been held on April 2, 1989. Numerous churches fought tooth and nail to have the decision to close churches reversed and tried to petition the Vatican, St. Benedict the Moor included, but the former school, pictured here, was quickly sold to a nearby church.
According to the Detroit Free Press, “Dr. Frederick Sampson, pastor of the 5,000-member Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church on the near west side, had been eyeing the nearby St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church as a possible annex for his church’s burgeoning social service programs.” The article also stated that, even then, the structure was in rough shape.
The structure spent the next decade and a half in use as the Tabernacle Annex or Tabernacle Annex Community Center. Here, Tabernacle MBC hosted classes, workshops, and other events for the church. Tabernacle MBC still exists, occupying a large building at the corner of Grand River and Grand Boulevard. However, at some point, they leased the structure to Greater Rock Missionary Baptist Church, which went belly up in 2009. Since then, the building appears to have been vacant.
Although I’ve occasionally seen this one broken open, it appears to be in good shape. It was featured in “Remembering Detroit’s Old West Side: 1920—1950,” a 1996 video created by the nonprofit Westsiders. In 1997, they released a book with the same title that was meant to be a pictorial guide to the neighborhood. I haven’t found either online, so I’m unsure how much it was covered.
The original Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church structure, formerly a Lutheran Church, still stands at 5781 Beechwood. As does the school; however, its condition will continue to deteriorate if it isn’t looked after better.
Although not architecturally significant, this structure plays a vital role in the neighborhood, both historically and geographically. Hopefully, it can be stabilized soon.
