St. Augustine's African Orthodox Church
St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church (AOC) is a small, unassuming house of worship in the middle of a residential section of Cambridgeport, a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts which abuts the northern bank of the Charles River. Built in 1886 in an unusual style—what is called ‘vernacular religious architecture’ and New England shingle style—its façade appears almost like that of a house, save for the tall belfry topped with an orthodox cross. St. Augustine’s, however, is much more than a building—it is an entire world unto itself, crisscrossed by rivers of stories flowing out in all directions. To fully grasp the enormity of this world, one must zoom out, in space and in time, to see how it came to be.
The African Orthodox Church was born of the encounter between two West Indian immigrants and committed Pan-Africanists in the United States: The firebrand organizer and activist Marcus Garvey from Jamaica and the Episcopalian minister George A. McGuire from Antigua. Both born in the Caribbean and part of the lively circuit of early 20th century transnational migration that produced the West Indian diaspora in the US, these men sought Pan-African unity, Black self-organization, and institution-building as means of collective liberation. They met when McGuire joined Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1918. Frustrated by the racism of his Episcopalian (Anglican) church, McGuire sought an alternative, settling eventually on Orthodox Christianity, which he believed had no connection to the slave trade or racism. Like many, his frustrations also brought him to the UNIA, the premier Pan-African organization in the world in the early 20th century, which Garvey had founded with his wife Amy Ashwood in 1914. While working within the UNIA, McGuire produced the foundational documents for what would become the AOC, and in 1921 he formally established the church, with St. Augustine’s as its pro-cathedral. The church largely served Greater Boston’s West Indian migrants, specifically the Bajan community.
We might usefully think about St. Augustine’s as the middle of a Venn diagram whose many overlapping ‘circles’ represent different aspects of the church’s community. The Pan-African circle encompasses the above-mentioned global movement out of which the AOC was born; the geographical circle encompasses the different places related to the community—the neighborhoods of Cambridgeport, Roxbury, and Dorchester, where its parishioners lived, and the Caribbean nation of Barbados from which so many of them hailed; the generational circle encompasses the multigenerational nature of the church as an institution, which covered life from baptism to death rites; the social circle encompasses those non-religious ways of being together and being part of the wider community that the church made possible; and finally, the spiritual circle which encompasses the idiosyncratic blend of Christian traditions that constituted the AOC.
On this Omeka site, you will find artifacts from the world of St. Augustine’s, grouped into these four main circles. Each artifact could tell many stories, both big and small, filling out this or that corner of the expansive world of St. Augustine’s. We gesture towards some of these stories and encourage visitors to see what others they can find.