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St. Paul United Methodist Church

San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Organized in 1866, St. Paul United Methodist Church was the first established for African Americans in San Antonio. Its origins were in Paine Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church South, which many of the founding members attended prior to emancipation. In 1866, the Rev. A. Larkin Carper began conducting services in the homes of San Antonio's Black families. Paine Chapel soon deeded him a building and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was founded. With the Freedmen's Bureau, members established the Lincoln School for African-American students in 1866. Members built a frame building in 1872 on land donated by church member McDaniel Webster; a stone structure replaced it in 1884. The area surrounding church property became known as St. Paul Square. The current sanctuary was completed in 1922. St. Paul first focused on community work through a Benevolent Society. The congregation also played a major role in the civil rights movement in San Antonio. The Rev. Mack Henson became a well-known voice for equality in the late 1800s. Dr. Green J. Starnes and other members continued the work in the early 20th century, focusing on education, health and social justice. In the 1940s, the church established St. Paul House, which provided meeting space and housing for travelers unable to find adequate hotels due to segregation. In 1951, trustees purchased the former Brackenridge Colored School building, which became a community educational complex. In 1967, the name of the congregation became St. Paul United Methodist Church as a result of the United Methodist merger. Members have continued to aid the needy in the community and have focused on working with children. Today, St. Paul United Methodist Church remains a vital link to San Antonio's African-American history, while serving as a spiritual leader. (2010)

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Organized in 1866, St. Paul was the first church established for African Americans in San Antonio, growing out of a congregation many members had attended before emancipation. Working with the Freedmen's Bureau, members founded the Lincoln School for Black students that same year, and over the decades the congregation became a hub of benevolence, education, and civil rights activism. During segregation it even opened St. Paul House to shelter Black travelers turned away from hotels.

Why it matters

The church stands as a cornerstone of Black San Antonio, linking emancipation, the fight for education, and the twentieth-century civil rights movement in one continuous story.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

St. Paul's story begins in 1866, in the first raw year after emancipation, when the enslaved people of Texas had only just learned they were free. San Antonio's Black families were building new lives from the ground up, and among the very first things they built was a church of their own. In a world that had denied them nearly everything, a congregation was more than a place of worship — it was a place to belong, to organize, to be fully themselves.

This was the era of Reconstruction, when the federal Freedmen's Bureau worked, unevenly and against fierce resistance, to help formerly enslaved people claim the rights and tools of citizenship. Education stood at the center of that effort, because literacy had been forbidden under slavery and was now understood as the key to everything else.

Against that backdrop, a small group of San Antonians who had worshipped before emancipation within a white-led congregation stepped out to form their own. What they created would grow, over generations, into an anchor of Black life in the city — a continuous thread running from the end of slavery straight through to the modern civil rights era.

People & events

It started in living rooms. In 1866 the Reverend A. Larkin Carper began holding services in the homes of San Antonio's Black families, and from those gatherings a congregation took shape. A building was deeded to the effort, and the new church was established. That same year, working with the Freedmen's Bureau, the members founded the Lincoln School — education and worship rising together, in the very first year of freedom.

The congregation kept building, literally and figuratively. A frame sanctuary went up in 1872 on land donated by a church member, replaced by a sturdier stone structure in 1884, until the neighborhood around it came to be known by the church's own name. The present sanctuary was completed in 1922, a landmark of the community it served.

And the church raised leaders. The Reverend Mack Henson became a well-known voice for equality in the late 1800s, and in the early twentieth century Dr. Green J. Starnes and others carried the work forward, pressing on education, health, and social justice. During the era of segregation, the congregation opened St. Paul House to give Black travelers a decent place to stay when hotels turned them away — and later acquired a former school building to serve as a community education complex. When the denominational merger that formed the United Methodist Church took effect, the congregation took the name it carries today.

Its place in the American story

St. Paul embodies one of the great truths of African American history: that the Black church was never only a church. From emancipation onward it served as school, meeting hall, refuge, and command post for the long struggle toward full citizenship. In founding a school in the same year they founded the congregation, these San Antonians were doing what freedpeople did all across the South — treating education as the first fruit of freedom.

The St. Paul House speaks to a harder national reality. Under segregation, an ordinary act like traveling could be humiliating and even dangerous for Black Americans, who were routinely refused rooms and meals. Across the country, churches, families, and Black-owned businesses built an informal network of safe havens, and this congregation's decision to shelter travelers turned away from hotels placed it squarely within that quietly heroic tradition.

And the pattern of leadership — a public voice for equality in the 1800s, a new generation continuing the work in the 1900s — mirrors the way the civil rights movement was carried, decade after decade, on the shoulders of local congregations long before it made national headlines. St. Paul is a reminder that the movement had deep roots, and that many of them were planted in churches like this one.

If you visit

Come to this marker ready to read slowly, because it compresses more than a century and a half of continuous history into a single wall of text. This is not the story of one moment but of an unbroken line — from services held in family parlors in 1866 to a thriving congregation today. Let that continuity sink in as you stand before it.

Look up at the sanctuary and consider the layers beneath it: a frame church, then a stone one, then the building that stands now, each raised by a community determined to have a permanent home. The neighborhood took the church's name, which tells you how central this congregation was to the life around it.

If you are exploring San Antonio's history beyond the obvious stops, this is a place to pause and reflect. It connects the end of slavery, the fight for Black education, the indignities of segregation, and the twentieth-century struggle for equality — all in one spot, all still living. Give it the quiet attention you would give any place where people built something lasting out of the hardest of beginnings.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · A. Larkin Carper
  • · Mack Henson
  • · Green J. Starnes

Related events

  • · Emancipation

Themes & tags

African American HistoryCivil RightsEducationChurch

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