Cambridge African Orthodox church pushes back against gentrification

In 2019, when Manjapra, Stearns Trustee professor of history at Northeastern University, finally became a member of the church, he worked with the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association as a grant writer on a restoration proposal to the Cambridgeport Historical Society to fix the church’s leaking roof. After they’d received the grant, Manjapra realized that fully reinvigorating the church would require more than fixing the roof; especially with the congregation steadily shrinking, a byproduct, he said, of the Black community being priced out of Cambridge by the area’s continued “hyper gentrification.”

The next year, Manjapra founded Black History in Action, Cambridge, a nonprofit dedicated to safeguarding, restoring, and revitalizing St. Augustine’s.

As his group worked on the multiyear restoration project of St. Augustine’s exterior, group members also began dreaming up ways to give the church a “new life” by creating opportunities to reconnect with the local community. That effort became Black History in Action’s Black Space for Arts and Empowerment program, which has hosted performances, education opportunities, and community events.

Manjapra said the church has always felt like an “art space” to him, so when they were figuring out what kind of events to have in it, the arts quickly came to mind.

Early on, the arts and empowerment program partnered with local groups like the Cambridge Jazz Foundation in 2023 and the Cambridge Youth Steel Orchestra in 2024, but once the building renovations were complete this year, the programming became a monthly series called Heart of the Culture. Events included a panel discussion on the history of Black churches in Cambridge exhibition, a marimba and dance performance, poetry performances, sound baths, and more.

“St. Augustine’s has always been a place that has stories to tell, that wants more stories to be told in it,” Manjapra said. “And the ways that it makes available for us to tell stories are so many — are so diverse, and the arts are what allow for that to happen.”

While the church still has religious services on Sundays, Heart of the Culture events are open to community members, regardless of religious belief.

Standing in St. Augustine’s wide center aisle on a summer Wednesday, Manjapra explained how Black History in Action rearranged the space for different performances. They moved the pews into semicircles, or pushed them against the walls to give dancers more space.

They also displayed church artifacts like the choir gowns, the bishop’s biretta hat, historical letters, and a register book from the 1960s, so people could get a better understanding of the church’s history.

Manjapra said the space played an important part in the performances, which he calls “loops,” referencing German performance scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte’s book “The Transformative Power of Performance.”

The performances weren’t a one-way street, he said, but an experience that required something from everyone involved: the performer, the audience, and the space. Together, the three entities created a specific experience that couldn’t be duplicated.

He cited two sound bath performances with Boston-based composer Forbes Graham as examples. For the sound baths, Graham sampled oral history recordings from the church’s archive and layered them with other music he produced into a two-hour performance where listeners could come and go as they pleased.

Manjapra described it as a profound experience with the creaking of the physical building adding texture to Graham’s historical content and making the space “come alive.”

Having historic places that offer resources for communities to tell their stories is very important, he said, “especially in the moment that we’re in with the kind of revenge politics that are ongoing.”

Manjapra also sees places like St. Augustine’s as an important tool to disrupt the narrative that gentrification is a process people need to accept as inevitable. He noted that renovating a church wasn’t something new. However, reconnecting the church to the current community while also honoring its legacy allowed St. Augustine’s to serve as an anti-gentrification practice, he said.

While the restoration of a building is important, he said the restoration of buildings for new purposes without context of their history or without the community they served “is a kind of damage that has become normalized.”

“It … ties into the beautification movement, and the idea that the best thing to do in a neighborhood is to ‘beautify it,’ and to take ‘derelict places and to refurbish them,’ and to give them new purposes and make them nice and shiny, but then the question is, for whom and at whose cost?,” Manjapra said.

“That’s exactly why we think of this project as anti-gentrification because, yeah, it is about re-enlivening. It is about reactivating, but not in a way that alienates the building from its original purposes, but that rather re-roots it in its legacy, and allows that legacy to live also for the people who are connected to that legacy, and then, of course, others.”

Now that the exterior renovation is done, Black History in Action is continuing their work on the interior of the church, including its basement. The goal is to level its floor and make it into a multi-use space.

Gabriel Cira, the architect leading the renovations, said there are many plans for the space. After having “community consultations” with local collaborators, neighbors, artists, and BIPOC community leaders, they’ve envisioned a community space that other artists and organizations can use, along with offices, an accessibility ramp, and more.

As it seeks more funding, Black History in Action continues to invite the community in; its next Heart of the Culture event on Sept. 14 is called “Centering Culture.” The event will be a panel with dancer-choreographer Mar Parrilla of Danza Orgánica, percussionist Cornell Coley, and interdisciplinary artist lfé Franklin on the importance of centering culture and creating positive community spaces or events. It will serve as a prelude to the three artists’ performances at MassQ Ball 2025 a cross-cultural celebration that blends an Indigenous face painting ritual and the arts on Oct. 4 at the Arnold Arboretum.