Mt. Zion Baptist Church
1969; 1989
950 File St., Winston-Salem, NC
Standing
Religious
One of Winston-Salem’s oldest African American congregations, Mt. Zion was established in 1889 and worshipped in a series of churches and other facilities between that time and the completion of this modernist building in 1969. (In 1963, urban renewal had forced the congregation to leave its Gothic Revival sanctuary built in 1916 at Maple and 9th Street.) Jenkins’s design combines a traditionally vertical, gabled church form with modernist simplicity and bold forms. The large annex (1989) was designed by Gantt Huberman Architects of Charlotte; architect Harvey Gantt, the first black architectural graduate of Clemson University, served as mayor of Charlotte and ran as the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in 1990 and 1996.