Shaffer's Chapel AME Church

The white stucco church standing on the corner of South Idaho and Platinum Streets was built in 1901 by Butte, Montana’s African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) congregation, who named it after the Bishop of the national A.M.E. church, Reverend Cornelius Shaffer. Founded in 1892, the small congregation comprised African American residents who lived on the blocks surrounding the church. Many of Butte’s Black residents worked in mining-related occupations, and this central location was convenient to the city’s mining operations.

Churches like Shaffer’s Chapel A.M.E. provided more than just spiritual fulfillment; they also provided critical space for organizing Montana’s Black community during the 20th century. Women, in particular, used churches like Shaffer’s Chapel A.M.E. to fight for civil rights reforms. In 1921, some of the church’s parishioners were among the women who founded the Montana Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs (MFNWC); Butte’s Pearl Club, who often met at Shaffer’s Chapel A.M.E., was one of the first 10 clubs in the federation. At the local level, these clubs often provided mutual aid to members of the Black community—and when they banded together as the MFNWC, they accomplished incredible things.

At their very first meeting in August of 1921, MFNWC representatives drafted a telegram to Montana’s Congressional representatives urging them to vote for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. (It failed to pass.) And in 1951, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional, the MFNWC named Butte businesses that discriminated against Black patrons in an open letter to Montanans and asked Butte residents to support desegregation.

After World War II, members of Butte’s Black community increasingly moved to larger cities where manufacturing jobs were more plentiful. In 1964, the congregation at Shaffer’s Chapel A.M.E. Church disbanded, and in 1972 the MFNWC did as well—but not before holding one of their annual meetings in the Finlen Hotel one of the businesses that the group had called out in 1951 for resisting integration. By 1972, as a result of the group’s lobbying and activism, the Finlen had changed its discriminatory policy, and Butte’s Black community began to patronize the hotel.

• Source: National Register of Historic Places, Shaffer’s Chapel A.M.E. Church, Washington, DC, National Register #100003199.