The North Cambridge Community Church was a predominantly Black church and community center located at 161-171 Walden Street from 1929/1930 until its demolition in 1949. It was a significant part of Cambridge’s Black community during the early-and-mid-twentieth century.
The story of the church begins with Samuel O. Weems and his wife, Gertrude Howard. Both Weems and Howard graduated with teaching degrees from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia in 1909. After marrying in 1910, the couple settled on a farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, where their first two children were born. Weems found an ad in the paper for the New Church Theological School (Swedenborgianism) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and after writing to the school’s president, he was encouraged to join the school.
Weems and his family moved to Cambridge by 1913, and in 1916 Weems graduated from the school and became the first African American to be ordained as a reverend into the Swedenborgian Church. That year, along with friends and a fellow Hamptonian, William L. Crawford, Weems founded the North Cambridge Community Church in his family’s home at 28 Hubbard Avenue (no longer extant).
The North Cambridge Community Church was part of a New Church Mission and was created in line with Weems’ following of Swedenborg philosophy: the church was open to anyone, nonsectarian, and created strong religious and social service programs for the community. By the early twentieth century, Black churches were already established in the Central Square area, but in North Cambridge, Weems’ church was the only local place where Black people could freely worship, and hosted the only social service agency in the area for the Black community.
The church was immediately successful and was especially popular with families wishing to send their children to Sunday School and summer classes. By 1927, inadequate space and an encroaching development forced the family and church to move out of their house. The Weems family moved to 14 Hubbard Avenue, and the church purchased an empty plot of land around 161-171 Walden Street (across from Raymond Park). They contracted the firm of Frohman, Robb and Little to design a new building with a chapel, recreational hall and vocational shop.
In 1930, following a fundraising campaign (including the above article), two stories of the proposed new church were built. It featured a Neo-Georgian triangular-shaped entrance leading downstairs into the interior; this lower level housed an auditorium that could seat 300 people and a large stage that accommodated theatrical and musical productions. The church hosted many musicians and speakers, such as North Pole explorer Matthew Henson; Florence Buck, a Unitarian minister; and John Orth, then the only living student of Franz Listz.
Although the full proposed church building was never constructed, the church’s congregation thrived. It hosted two church services each Sunday and year-round programs and activities, many centered around educating local youth: Sunday school, summer school, the Troop 9 Boy Scouts of America, Camp Fire for girls, a church garden, and vocational classes on sewing, printing, music, gardening, and woodworking.
Reverend Weems was one of the leaders in the local civil rights movement. In the 1930s, Weems was vocal in speaking out against the treatment of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American boys who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. Weems and his family frequently attended civil rights rallies and meetings, and brought in speakers to the church to discuss peace and current events.
According to the Weems’ daughter, Marie Davis, the congregation had a positive relationship with the neighborhood. One particular exception involved the actions of a hostile neighbor: on warm days, when the church’s front door was open and Reverend Weems’ voice could be heard outside, the neighbor would call the police on the church. According to Marie Davis, the police would come downstairs to the sanctuary and stand there while her father continued preaching.
Beginning in 1946 the congregation began to break up, and in 1949 the building was demolished by the Cambridge Housing Authority for the Lincoln Way veterans housing development (built 1950). Reverend and Gertrude Weems and several of their seven children remained active in community and religious organizations.
Marie Davis’s recollections of the church and Black spiritual life in Cambridge can be read in “In Our Own Words: Stories of North Cambridge, 1900-1960, as told to Sarah Boyer” (1997).
