Bethel A.M.E.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after the failure of white-European American Methodists to accede to and practice the Christian belief that all persons are equal before God and endowed with equal value. White congregants' refusal to recognize freed African American Methodists as their equals moved African Americans to secede from the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1787. In 1794 the first AME chapel, Bethel AME, was established in Philadelphia with the central precept that God is "no respector of person." The first independent Methodist denomination in the state, Bethel AME Church was established in Little Rock in 1865 by Reverend Nathan Warren. The church in Arkansas worked to ensure its members acquired an education and property. Preoccupation with educational advancement eventually led the AME conference of Arkansas to establish a school of learning, Bethel Institute (later renamed Shorter College), in the basement of Bethel AME in 1886. Inadequate educational opportunities for African-American Arkansans made the establishment of Bethel Institute a necessity. The illiteracy rate in Arkansas for African-Americans was well over 53 percent when Bethel Institute was established. Since this rate was unacceptable, African Methodists ministers preached to their congregants that change of their economic and political status was possible only through educational attainment.

Nathan Warren's stewardship of Bethel AME Church was informed by his experiences as an African American during and after antebellum. Warren was enslaved in the District of Columbia when Robert Crittenden, who served as the first secretary of the Arkansas Territory, purchased him in 1819 and brought him to Arkansas. Upon Crittenden's death in 1834, Warren purchased his freedom from Crittenden's family, married, and lived as a freedman and confectioner in Little Rock until 1856. Warren and other freed African-Americans left the state after a group of working-class, white union members successfully agitated in 1859 for the passage of Act 151, banning freed African-Americans from Arkansas. Warren and his family returned to Washington DC, where he became involved with the AME Church. When he and his family returned to Little Rock in 1863, Warren begin ministering to a small group of African-Americans when the decision was made to construct Bethel AME Church in 1875 at the corner of 9th Street and Broadway in the heart of Little Rock's black community. Bethel emphasized service, education, and the social and political uplift of African-Americans alongside its ministering to African-Americans' spiritual needs.

Bethel's church culture kindled a collective politico-religious identity and consciousness among African Americans that encouraged them to interpret and act on Jesus's proclamation in the Gospel of Luke: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me; therefore he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind and release to prisoners." This liberationist mission was evident during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when racial tensions in the region escalated to the point that Arkansas's AME leaders and assemblies embraced the Back-to-Africa Movement to escape white supremacy terror. AME leaders in Little Rock and across Arkansas raised tens of thousands of dollars for the movement and supported several individual missionaries.

During the Jim Crow era Bethel AME members upheld their church's creed that God is "no respector person" by struggling to secure social and economic justice. Lawyer Scipio A. Jones, a member of Bethel AME and graduate of Bethel Institute, successfully defended 12 African-American men arrested after the 1919 Elaine Massacre and helped prevent a similar tragedy in Little Rock in 1927. Bethel AME Church and its members were also heavily involved in the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis of 1957. Reverend Rufus K. Young Jr., who presided as minister at Bethel AME Church, supported the efforts of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) under the leadership of Bethel AME member, Daisy Bates. As president of the Arkansas NAACP, Bates was the face of the school desegregation movement in the state. Moreover, several of the Little Rock Nine students who integrated Little Rock Central High School, attended Bethel AME.