By Michael Henry Adams | New York Amsterdam News
(WIB) – Completed in 1887, Harlem’s Richardsonian Romanesque-style Salem United Methodist Church was designed by John Rochester Thomas for the white congregation of the Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church. Boasting the city’s largest Methodist membership, the building has seating for 2,200 people.
The brick building was purchased in 1922 by the Salem United Methodist Church, for $25,000. A weeklong revival by evangelist John Wilson Becton in 1933 retired its mortgage. Salem was established by Rev. Frederick Asbury Cullen, foster father of the great poet Countee Cullen.
Over the years it’s been the backdrop of many momentous occasions. President William McKinley once worshipped here, in 1899. It was also the church home of Marian Anderson. Spectacularly, Salem was the setting for Countee Cullen’s 1928 Easter Monday wedding to Yolande Du Bois. The lavish service (reusing Sunday’s profusion of flowers and caged love birds), had sixteen bridesmaids and as many ushers. All 1,300 guests must have whispered to one another, “Doesn’t she know he’s gay?” while, outside, crowds of spectators thronged Seventh Avenue for a better view.
In The Crisis, the bride’s father proclaimed of her betrothal: “The symbolic march of young black America … possessed of dark and shimmering beauty … a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world.”
The honeymoon only lasted a weekend, because as a teacher, Mrs. Cullen needed to get back to her school in Baltimore. According to plan, she did join Cullen (who worked at Dewitt Clinton High School where he taught French to James Baldwin), in Paris later. Right after they married, he went to do research with a Guggenheim Fellowship. She didn’t arrive until school let out, by which time Harold Jackman, her husband’s best man, had come and gone. Called Harlem’s handsomest man, he was not Cullen’s lover. Close friends, they were like “sisters.” Nevertheless, the couple soon divorced anyway.
Called one of the most elaborate ever conducted in Harlem, the funeral of star female impersonator Clarence Edwin Henderson, was held here in August 1936. A former schoolteacher, twice married (the second time for just five weeks), “Clarenz” had a six-year-old daughter.
The AmNews wrote how he’d told his landlady, “My life is miserable. I love Alberta. She Is sweet to me, does anything she can to make me happy. But she doesn’t understand me. My life is my own and I have to live it to suit myself.” With that, bounding out of his chair, he leapt to his death from his fourth-floor kitchen window. His note, addressed to a man, read: “She loves me. She hates you. But I adore you. You love me. So what?”
The funeral ritual was presided over by the “burying preacher of Harlem,” the Rev. W. Willard Monroe. A year earlier he’d founded the Memorial Baptist Church. Carried into the church on the shoulders of eight men, a 12-foot floral cross took half an hour to place on the rostrum above the brier. It was a tribute from Leroy McDonald, proprietor of the 1-0-1 Cabaret.
Billed as Harlem’s greatest master of ceremonies, Clarenz worked at the 1-0-1 for just two years. He was only 25.
Under the leadership of the Rev. Noel N. Chin, Salem still continues its commendable traditions. It still stages memorable rites that sustain the lives of folks pursuing righteousness. Attracting a cross-section of our community’s best, Harlem’s leave taking of Lloyd A. Williams, leader of Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, took place here on Aug. 23, 2025. In the African American cultural capital, Salem still manifests an abiding presence of faith.