Groundsite Image Gallery
St. Luke AME Church
Artist: Hughes, Langston
Height: 0.000"
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St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church, 900 New York St. (1910)
This Gothic revival building was built in 1910. The building was placed on the register of Kansas historical buildings in 2001 because of its connection to Langston Hughes.
Hughes attended this church when he lived with Auntie and Uncle Reed, as he writes in his autobiography The Big Sea, Auntie Reed was a Christian and made me go to church and Sunday school every Sunday (18). The Reeds lived two blocks away at 731 New York St.
Hughes also remembers when Nash Walker, a famous Vaudeville performer from Lawrence, returned to this church to present a concert at my aunt’s church on the phonograph, playing records for the benefit of the church mortgage fund (23). His uncle Nathaniel Langston, before he died, taught Nash music, and Hughes’s mother was a schoolmate of Nash.