The roots of the national AME Zion faith reach back to 1796. Blocked from leadership roles and forced to worship in segregated spaces, black Methodists in response founded their own chapel in New York City. Similarly, in Ithaca, a group of black Christians, led by Reverend Henry Johnson and including Baptists Peter and Phyllis Webb from Caroline and others who left the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Ithaca, affiliated with the AME Zions and formed their own church in 1833.

While majority white Christian churches were criticized as “the bulwarks of American slavery” by an early abolitionist, AME churches, by contrast, were known as freedom churches, “places where black self-determination was promoted, and [which] functioned as venues where preaching and concrete opposition to slavery were normative activities,” explains historian Dennis C. Dickerson.

Church members and ministers of the St. James AME Zion Church, including Thomas James, who helped the Ithaca congregation build the original one-story stone structure, and Jermain Wesley Loguen, actively promoted abolition and supported freedom seekers as they made their way to Canada on the Underground Railroad, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850.

The church itself sheltered travelers as a safehouse on the freedom route north. Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass both spoke at St. James. “We have got in this country a system of wickedness which cannot bear the light of free discussion. We have here 3,000,000 of God's children bound in chains, and who are murderously robbed of all their dearest rights,” Douglass argued in his famous 1852 Ithaca abolitionist lecture.

During the Civil War, St. James served as an enlistment site for black soldiers. A monument “dedicated to the 26 soldiers of the 26th Regiment United States Colored Infantry who enlisted . . . to fight for God and liberty” stands beside the church.

 St. James AME Zion Church provided a hub of community social and political life for black Ithacans. In addition to the everyday round of Sunday services, Sunday school for younger churchgoers, and suppers and bazaars to raise funds for the church, members joined in moral reform movements of the late 1800s, including temperance. They attended and hosted lectures to fight the evils of intemperate alcohol consumption. In the 1880s, the Zion Lyceum tackled pressing political issues of the day. (The “lyceum” movement began in the 1820s in Massachusetts and was an early form of providing adult education.) In 1885, for example, Lyceum member H.H. Coleman spoke about “The Relation of the Negro to the Present Administration.” Other meetings offered “literary exercises,” including a debate between Lula Newton and Mrs. E. Moore on “Which is the greater poet, Shakespeare or Milton?”

Clearly, for AME church members, spiritual uplift went along with political engagement and education, and they extended these goals to supporting the wider community. In the early twentieth century, St. James hosted meetings of Cornell students who founded Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s first black fraternity (see Dennis-Newton House site history). St. James churchwomen organized and led the Serv-Us League that established the Southside Community Center.

St. James parishioners, recognizing the church’s local significance and contribution to national events, over the decades raised money to add on to the structure and maintain it. The entire Ithaca community has joined church members and staff of Historic Ithaca, Tompkins County’s preservation organization, to help church members raise funds for exterior repairs.

In 1975, local officials designated St. James AME Zion a local landmark, and in 1982 it was listed on the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places. The small church community continues to offer weekly services presided by a pastor and sponsors various activities, including Christian education classes, a Youth Ministry, and a youth music program.