Quinn Chapel: Chicago's Oldest Black Congregation

In eighteen forty-four, seven Black Chicagoans began meeting weekly for prayer in one another's homes. Three years later they organized formally as an African Methodist Episcopal congregation and named themselves Quinn Chapel after Bishop William Quinn, the A.M.

E. bishop who oversaw their diocese. It is the oldest Black congregation in the city of Chicago.

Before the Civil War, Quinn Chapel served as a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers moving north. Members of the congregation later founded Provident Hospital, the first hospital in the country run by African Americans. The current Gothic Revival building at Wabash Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street has stood since eighteen ninety-one.

Over the decades its pulpit hosted Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King Junior. The congregation still worships here today.