George Beauchamp Vick (1901–1975), known as G. B. Vick, or G. Beauchamp Vick, was pastor of Temple Baptist Church of Detroit, Michigan, from 1950 to the 1970s. J. Frank Norris, pastor of Temple Baptist from 1934 to 1950, appointed Vick in 1935 to help him manage the church, as Norris himself traveled between it and First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. In 1950, Vick had a falling out with Norris and became solitary pastor of Temple Baptist. Vick and others disillusioned with the direction Norris had taken, founded the Baptist Bible Fellowship International and Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri.
Vick was a staunch segregationist, grounding his racism in the Bible. "God warned repeatedly in the Old Testament against Israel's mixture with other races and we believe that it is not only unwise but unchristian to thus cause confusion by mixture of the races," he wrote. Accordingly, Blacks were not allowed to join the church during his tenure, a whites-only policy that continued after him until 1986. Indeed, the church building on Grand River Avenue became during the mid-1950s a center of white resistance to integration of Detroit neighborhoods.[1]
Church history and buildings
Temple Baptist Church began as one congregation in 1921 with a merger between the Fourteenth Avenue Baptist Society [1892–1921] and the Grand River Avenue Baptist Church, both of Detroit, the Church was renamed and many of its former members left after the appointment of Brad Powell as Pastor in 1991, some time after which the Church was renamed as NorthRidge Church, removing "Baptist" from the title.[2][3]
This church, having experienced many dramatic changes under Powell continues meeting at its large edifice in 49555 North Territorial Road, Plymouth, Michigan (a far-western suburb of Detroit, closer to Ann Arbor), where Temple had moved to due to dramatic growth preceding 1951 under both Vick and Norris which necessitated the vacation and sale (to a black congregation, King Solomon Baptist Church) of the former two meetinghouses on the corner of 6105, 14th Street in Detroit; the 5,000-seat auditorium of which, built in 1937 for Temple, is today the meeting-place of Starr of Zion Missionary Baptist Church, however King Solomon Baptist still owns both buildings, including the original church building of Fourteenth Avenue Baptist Church, built in 1917.[4]
References
- ^ Gregory, James N. (2005). The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. pp. 231–232. ISBN 0-8078-7685-2. OCLC 70273090.
- ^ "Tipping Sacred Cows into a Golden Calf – the Center for the Study of God & Culture".
- ^ "Senior Pastor". 26 January 2022.
- ^ "History of King Solomon Baptist Church".
Sources
- Brackney, William H. Historical Dictionary of the Baptists. 2nd ed. Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements 94. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
- Hankins, Barry. God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
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