MADISON, Wis. (Channel3000.com) — St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church was Madison’s first Black church. It was founded by a former Kentucky slave in 1902 when only 69 of the city’s 27,600 residents were Black. Ever since, it has been a center of Madison’s Black community.
“I was from Arkansas, and I know what segregation was all about—colored and white fountains and water—but then when I came to Madison, you almost had the same thing,” Myzell Alexander, a member of the church since 1961, said. It was the church, though, that gave him refuge.