A center of Black community life since 1926, Second Baptist Church has hosted MLK, Malcolm X & James Baldwin, and is an early work of noted LA architect Paul R. Williams

I’m celebrating Black History Month throughout February by visiting sites important to the history of Black Angelenos.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 17, 2009

Standing just a block west of the historic Central Avenue corridor in South Los Angeles is the Second Baptist Church, home to the oldest Black Baptist congregation in LA. For nearly 100 years, this building has hosted worship services, community gatherings, political rallies and speeches by some of the most important Black thinkers and activists in America.

The NAACP held its first west coast conference here, in 1928. This was the first LA church that Martin Luther King, Jr. visited, in May of 1956, and also the last one he spoke at, two weeks before his assassination in 1968. Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwsin, Ralph Bunche, Thurgood Marshall, Paul Robeson, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Mayor Tom Bradley, Coretta Scott King, Cornel West, Rev. Al Sharpton, Michael Eric Dyson and so many more have spoken here over the years. Today, it continues to be an active force for community improvement and social justice. In 2021, the Second Baptist Church became part of the African-American Civil Rights Network, a program run by the National Park Service to commemorate the history of Black civil rights in America.

As a congregation, the Second Baptist Church has existed in LA since 1885, when a small group of Black families attending the mostly white First Baptist Church (then located downtown) decided to form their own church. Second Baptist had several homes over the next few decades, but as the African-American population in LA grew in the early 20th century, so too did the need for a more permanent home fit for the future. In 1921, the church hired visionary pastor Thomas L. Griffith, who set out to raise funds for a new church that could seat 2500 – the largest meeting space owned by the Black community in the western US.

It must have sounded like an audacious plan, to build a church large enough to accommodate 10% of LA’s total Black population. But the entire congregation pitched in to raise the ~$200k estimated cost, with help from the Los Angeles City Mission Society; ever the community builder, Griffith asked that all of the skilled workmen who built the church were employed by Black-owned businesses. At the dedication ceremony on January 3, 1926, visiting Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. called it the “most elaborate” Baptist church in the West. 

Even now, 96 years after it was built, you can see what he meant. The Second Baptist Church is a majestic building, clad in multi-colored brick with finely-ornamented stonework around the doors. It’s almost castle-like in its Lombard Romanesque style, with a lovely rose window on the north side that further cements its connection to European cathedral design tradition. 

This was one of the early major buildings designed by Paul R. Williams, the very first Black architect to be admitted to the American Institute of Architects, and a hometown hero for LA architecture fans. Only 31 when he designed the Second Baptist Church (in collaboration with Norman Marsh), Williams already showed a mastery of classic architectural styles in his work on the church’s exterior. His work is unmissable if you’re exploring the built history of Black Los Angeles; he designed the 28th Street YMCA, the original Angelus Funeral Home, the current Golden State Life Insurance Building, the Pueblo del Rio housing project and the First AME Church building in Jefferson Park – the present home of the only Black congregation in LA older than the Second Baptist Church. 

It is pretty wild to spin around at the intersection of Griffith Ave. and E. 24th Street, and realize how this impressive-looking church, with its storied history, is surrounded on every side by single-family homes, occupied by normal people living normal lives. And animals, too. When I visited Second Baptist on a sleepy Saturday afternoon, roosters and a cat were walking around a front yard just across the street. It all feels right. The church is a place for community, after all, and this one is embedded right within the community that it serves.

Recommended Reading

+Second Baptist Church NRHP nomination form

+Second Baptist Church LA: Timeline of HIstoric Events (secondbaptistchurchla.org)

+California: Second Baptist Church Los Angeles (National Park Service)

+Second Baptist Church, Los Angeles, CA (Paul Revere Williams Project)