The corner of Toledano and South Galvez streets has been a gathering place for a hundred years, and on the weekend of October 17 and 18, Pleasant Zion Missionary Baptist Church intends to fill it again — this time with barbecue smoke, gospel harmonies, and the sound of young musicians from across the city.
The Central City church's Centennial Celebration Weekend opens Saturday, Oct. 17, with a Community Outreach Fest running from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Organizers promise free barbecue plates, fresh food giveaways, free vaccines, prizes and activities, all set up on the church grounds at 3317 Toledano St. There are no tickets and no capacity limit; church leaders say everyone is welcome.
The afternoon's entertainment leans deliberately on the neighborhood's young talent. The lineup spans public, private and parochial schools, with a heavy showing from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Noble Hart-Hart Academy's pianist and poet Cherielle Clark of George Washington Carver High are on the bill, along with a pair of NOCCA violinists, Cortez Ward and Terrill Hill, and NOCCA contemporary dancers Konstance Epps and Brooklyn London. Keshaun Tervalon of Loyola University sings; Abijah Wood Dawson of New Orleans Charter Science & Math High School gives an oration; Aenea Hester Riley of Benjamin Franklin High performs cultural dance, and Karen Davis Studios brings contemporary dance. From the LSU system come saxophonist Jason Jones, a jazz set from Jason and Band, violist Noah Henderson and dancer Brooklyn London.
The next day, Sunday, Oct. 18, the celebration turns to music of a more sacred kind. A Centennial Anniversary Musical begins at 3 p.m. on the church grounds, headlined by the Zion Harmonizers and joined by local historically Black college and university choirs.
Booking the Zion Harmonizers for a hundredth anniversary is a fitting choice, because the group carries a history nearly as long as the church's own. The Harmonizers were founded in 1938, when a teenager named Benjamin Maxon Jr. organized a quartet of friends in New Orleans' Zion City neighborhood. When Maxon answered the call to preach in 1943, an apprehensive Sherman Washington took over leadership. Washington would go on to become one of the most consequential figures in the city's gospel music, running the Gospel Tent after Jazz Fest moved to the Fair Grounds in 1972. The Harmonizers have played every New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival since the first one in 1970. The group is now led by Brazella E. Briscoe Sr., who joined in 1988, and still performs.
Pleasant Zion's own story is a chronicle of a congregation that kept moving and kept growing. According to the church's written history, it was organized on Sunday, Dec. 26, 1926, at 4:30 p.m., in the edifice of First Mount Calvary Baptist Church, pastored by the Rev. I.B. Gaskin. The founding pastor was the late Rev. George W. McWaters Sr., and the congregation began with 39 adults and 13 children — 52 souls in all, who first met in one another's homes. The name, the church's history notes, "was given it because that name expressed the disposition of the members that composed it."
Five months and eleven days after organizing, on June 6, 1927, the members marched into their own small building at 3216 Fourth Street, singing "When the Saints Go Marching In." They stayed until 1942, when a new edifice was built; while construction went on, they worshiped at Second Zion Baptist Church under the Rev. C.S. Delond, returning in October 1942. The church was incorporated at that location in May 1944.
Then came the disruption that eventually brought Pleasant Zion to Toledano Street. On April 6, 1951, the Orleans Parish School Board bought the Fourth Street site to build what became Taylor Park School. Once again the congregation decamped to Second Zion while a new sanctuary rose. On the evening of Dec. 13, 1951, the members marched from Second Zion to their permanent home on Toledano, this time singing "We Are Marching to Zion, Beautiful, Beautiful, Zion." Delond preached the sermon, and the pastor offered the dedicatory prayer.
The church has been led since Oct. 5, 1986, by the Rev. Dr. Kenneth E. Thompson, who was first called as interim pastor in May of that year and has since carried on what the church describes as a legacy of keeping Pleasant Zion "Bible Fed, Spirit Led." His tenure has now run nearly four decades — long enough to see the congregation pass its 90th anniversary and approach its hundredth.
That century is the occasion for the weekend's events, and the shape of the celebration says something about how the church understands itself. Rather than confining the milestone to a sanctuary service, Pleasant Zion is taking it to the street corner, pairing the anniversary musical with vaccines, groceries and free plates of barbecue. It is a centennial framed less as a look backward than as an act of neighborhood service — the same instinct, perhaps, that led 52 people to name their fledgling congregation for the disposition they wanted to be known by.
Both events are free and open to the public. The Community Outreach Fest runs Saturday, Oct. 17, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the corner of Toledano and South Galvez; the Centennial Anniversary Musical follows Sunday, Oct. 18, at 3 p.m. on the church grounds at 3317 Toledano St.