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By Melanie Lekocevic

Capital Region Independent Media

COEYMANS — A watershed time period in American history directly led to the construction of one of Coeymans’ major landmarks.

Riverview Missionary Baptist Church was the brainchild of African Americans who moved from the South to the North during this time period in search of employment and better opportunities for their families.

The Great Migration took place from the early years of the 1900s through nearly the middle of the century, and had a profound impact on the entire country and the makeup of Coeymans, as well.

The time period, and the construction of the local church, was the topic of the February meeting of the Ravena Coeymans Historical Society, with retired Revs. Dr. Roxanne Jones Booth and Antonio Booth presenting to a packed audience.

“The Great Migration is a period in American history when people moved from one location to another,” the Rev. Dr. Roxanne Jones Booth said. “This period of time marked the time when nearly 6 million people of African descent, African Americans, left the South and migrated to the North  — 6 million.”

Prior to the Great Migration, the vast majority of African Americans lived in the southern states.

“When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863  — when [President Abraham] Lincoln said all the enslaved people in the southern states were now free — less than 8% of African Americans lived in the other areas of the United States. So, in the North, Northeast, out west, Midwest, there were small populations of people of color.”

In 1900, 90% of the nation’s Black population lived in the south, descendants of enslaved people who were now free but had remained in the South. One reason they stayed was to search for their relatives, Jones Booth said, family members who had been “sold” to other places in the South and they were still searching for them.

But when families started migrating north, it was a monumental change for the country.

“The Great Migration is considered the largest migration of Americans that this country had ever experienced,” Antonio Booth said. “There were 6 million people migrating from one part of the country to another.”

The migration was spurred by the need for workers in the North.

“There was a labor shortage in the wake of the First World War from 1914 to 1917, and we know that people of African descent could not fight in the war because it was segregated,” Roxanne Jones Booth said. “So, when white men went away to fight in the war, that left some places and jobs available for people of African descent and they began to migrate to these urban settings. If there was expanding industry, that meant there were job opportunities in northern businesses, such as the railroads, meat-packing companies, brickyards and stockyards — they all recruited people and the people they recruited were those people in the South who were looking for a better opportunity.”

Some also left because of the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, Roxanne Jones Booth said, and the terrorism and lynchings that followed.

When families arrived in Coeymans, they took on a variety of jobs, many with the local brickyard. In addition to moving their families to the North, they also brought another important aspect of their lives.

“They also brought their faith, because they were Christian folks in the South, and when they made that trek up north, they brought their faith, which was a part of who they were,” she said.

And that was how the Riverview Missionary Baptist Church was founded in 1926.

“It started as a prayer group — some of the men were preachers from Halifax, Virginia, and they started a prayer group to bring people together for prayer and to read the Bible,” she said. “One day, the brickyard owner from Sutton & Sudderly told them they need to purchase some land and build a church, and they did — they purchased the land where the building is today.”

Many of the founding members of the church had masonry skills, and they dug out the foundation and built the church themselves. Women of the prayer group also had a lasting impact on the church’s creation.

“Susie Moton and three other women contributed $1 each to purchase the first bricks to build a church building,” she said.

The Rev. Nathaniel Staggers was the church’s first pastor after the building was constructed, and he led the congregation from 1933 to 1946.