Calvary Baptist Church and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church hosted a memorial service for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Sunday. Services commemorating King have taken place in various places of worship on the East End since his death in 1968. On the day of his funeral, East Hampton schools, retail businesses, and the library were closed to honor the civil rights leader, who advocated for justice and whose activism led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
At Calvary Baptist Church, these memorial services began in 1980. This photograph, from The East Hampton Star’s archive and taken on Jan. 25, 1986, shows one of them. Pictured from left to right are the longtime associate minister of the church, the Rev. Dr. Connie Jones, the Rev. Carolyn Pharaoh of the historic St. David’s A.M.E. Zion Church in Sag Harbor, Audrey Gaines, who was the director of East Hampton’s youth services and a board member of the town’s Anti-Bias Task Force, Blanche Blowe, and Sharlene Hartwell, known by many for her work at Calvary Baptist and LTV, the local television station.
As Calvary Baptist was a relatively new building compared to other places of worship in East Hampton, many churchgoers originally attended services at St. Matthew’s Chapel, which was built in 1852. More than a hundred years later, on Oct. 12, 1958, worshippers marched from St. Matthew’s to Calvary Baptist, a space to accommodate the growing congregation. A recording of this march can be seen at Digital Long Island.
The Calvary Baptist Church that stands today was constructed in 1968, with funds raised by the community and local clergymen, whose donations went to a “living memorial” to King.
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Megan Bardis is a librarian and archivist in the Long
