When you walk into St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Norfolk, you see a gorgeous near-140-year-old building. But when you look around, you see a lot of work needs to be done before the congregation can worship there again.
The church just found out it won two grants to help with that restoration project. Now it needs the community’s help to fill some gaps.
St. John’s AME has been a longtime beacon for Norfolk’s Black community, and history is everywhere inside the building that has sat at Bute and Church streets near downtown Norfolk for 138 years.
Rev. Christian Savage showed News 3 some of the artifacts, including the journal of the first Virginia annual conference of the African Methodist Episcopal church held in 1867 and a pulpit Thurgood Marshall the first Black Supreme Court justice spoke from in 1939…