African-Americans:
Slavery and Emancipation

Segregation in Places of Worship
Dozens of accounts of segregated seating in churches in New York and other Northern cities, both before and after the abolition of slavery, have been found. Early and mid 19th century sources usually refer to these areas as "Negro pews", "nigger seats", or "the African corner". In the 1830s and 40s, the New York Colored American ran several editorials urging its readers to oppose segregation in New York churches by standing in the aisle instead of sitting in Negro pews.
Segregated seating appears to have taken three forms. First, pews in the sanctuary could be segregated by race, with blacks designated to the rears pews or to seats around the sides. On August 19, 1837, the Colored American published an editorial criticizing the Broadway Tabernacle, a Presbyterian Church, for forcing blacks to sit in the "southern tier of pews." In his 1897 autobiography, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, Charles Haswell remembered the New York City of the 1820s as a place that enforced a rigid racial code of conduct. Haswell specifically recalled that some New York City churches restricted black worshippers to seats in "pews at the foot of aisles".

Second, and perhaps most common, were galleries, or balconies. At the opening of the John Street Methodist Church in Lower Manhattan in January 1818, Rev. Nathan Bangs addressed "those in the gallery" when welcoming the inclusion of African Americans and praising Methodist preachers for their active and early opposition to slavery. In 1819, John Pintard described his delight in seeing "about 700 children, males and females, and a large number of color, assembled in the galleries" of New York Protestant Episcopal Sunday Meeting at St. Paul's Chapel. Alexander Crummell, the second black Episcopal minister to be ordained in New York, protested that in Episcopal churches in the 1840s "negro pews were stuck up in obscure places". Even in Plymouth Church, built in 1849 on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights (where it became the center of the abolitionist movement in New York), showed upper galleries labeled "for colored people" in its 1934 Historic American Buildings Survey measured drawings.

The third form of segregated seating are what have been called "hidden galleries", separate, closed rooms above the balcony as found in St. Augustine's Church on the Lower East Side. There are only a few extant examples of hidden galleries known. An editorial in the Colored American from the 1830s described the offensive seating arrangement for blacks in the Dutch Reform Church of Schenectady:

"[The church had] so-called 'negro pews'…situated in the east and the west corners of the church, two up, and two down stairs; and they are as far off from the pulpit as they could be without going out of doors…The ones upstairs are not so pleasant; they are built on each side of the organ, over the stairway, and will hold about eight persons each, and to get into them you must ascend three or four steps. Truly they are very offensive to me, because they are haughty monuments of the colored people's sufferings, and the Church's disgrace."