The ritual of a Sunday morning at Bethel AME Church has been a lifelong one for 92-year-old Guinervere Banks. In fact, she says she’s been attending the church for 93 years.
“My mother carried me there in her belly.”
She was a dedicated presence at the church’s Sunday school, morning and evening, though she joked that she and the others would occasionally duck out, as children do.
As a young woman, she witnessed history firsthand, attending Civil Rights meetings in the church’s sanctuary led by Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee leader Gloria Richardson in and observing negotiations for the Treaty of Cambridge.
“It was the center of focus of the Civil Rights Movement,” Banks said.
Though Cambridge AME ministers faced resistance when they tried to create the Bethel Society in 1830, they managed to purchase some land for $125 in 1847, establishing the church as one of the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Churches in Cambridge. Founded by free Black shoemaker Simon Brown and other local trustees of the Cambridge African Methodist Bethel Church, the congregation met in wooden structures — one of which was burned in 1877— until they constructed its current Gothic Revival brick building in 1903.
More than half a century later, Bethel AME Church was considered the headquarters of the local Civil Rights Movement. Unlike the national movement of its era, the Cambridge Movement was primarily led by women activists rather than male clergy.
For a long time, Richardson had remained on the edges of the Civil Rights Movement because she disagreed with its commitment to nonviolence. “Revolts seemed to be the only thing that America understands, and the nation’s racial problems made revolts unavoidable,” she later said of her thinking, but eventually she was asked by SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) to create its first adult chapter there in Cambridge.
The Cambridge Movement, as it came to be known, mixed its insistence on the right to armed self-defense with a strong focus on economic justice.
“When we got into the movement, it had to do with jobs, education, healthcare, and housing,” said Dion Banks, Guinervere’s nephew and a founder of Eastern Shore Network for Change.
For most of its history, the neighborhood featured two distinct commercial corridors — Race Street for white residents and Pine Street for Black residents, according to the Dorchester Star. Once known as the “Black Wall Street,” Pine Street housed dozens of family-run businesses until the Cambridge Riot of 1967 reduced its thriving economy to ruins, shifting the neighborhood’s trajectory for decades.
Because of the port, there had always been plenty of jobs and businesses in the town, Dion said. But when Phillips Packing Company began laying people off from their 17 factories, unemployment hit hard, and the previously comfortable community got activated.
“Up until that point we all had jobs,” Dion said.
The movement successfully forced the desegregation of local public facilities, hospitals, and schools, while sparking the longest period of martial law in any state since 1877.
The movement’s deviation from nonviolence was put to the ultimate test during what is called the Cambridge Riot of 1963, but which could also be seen as the first two instances of armed revolt during the Civil Rights Movement and is often called the precursor to the Black Power movement.
What began as peaceful marches protesting the harsh sentencing of two African American Civil Rights protesters quickly turned violent when fights broke out between African Americans and segregationist whites, according to NBC’s “The American Revolution of ’63” broadcast that same year.
The violence continued throughout the summer. Democratic Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes deployed the National Guard to Cambridge, effectively placing the city under martial law.
“The National Guards was right in the street,” Guinervere Banks recalls. “We had shooting and stuff, and dogs barking, and people getting arrested … I didn’t go to jail because I turned around because I had small children. Some of the other men, the men went to jail.”
Guinervere Banks was there, at Bethel, when Richardson negotiated with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and city officials to broker what came to be known as the Treaty of Cambridge. The city agreed to begin desegregating the schools and to adopt a charter amendment to desegregate public accommodations, among other concessions. But the charter amendment was ultimately left to a vote in what Richardson said was “an attempt to make the constitutional rights of the Negro people, as citizens of Cambridge, subject to the possible prejudices of the white majority,” according to Standford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.
White segregationists were even more dissatisfied, and protests had begun again by 1964, when the National Guard teargassed and arrested Black activists protesting a visit by Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace.
On July 24, 1967, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman H. Rap Brown visited the town where he delivered a fiery speech to a crowd of 500 cheering supporters.
“If America don’t come around, we’re going to burn it down,” he shouted while standing on the trunk of a car.
Many have claimed this speech resulted in the fire that devastated Pine Street. Banks disagrees.
“They say he [H. Rap Brown] burned Pine Street down,” she said. “But he didn’t. It wasn’t us who burned Pine Street down.”
She said that firefighters wouldn’t come to put out the blaze.
Also a lifelong member of the church, Guinervere’s nephew Gregory Sampson, 71, vividly remembers the thriving Black-owned businesses that once lined Pine Street.
“Back in the 1960s, we didn’t depend on white people,” he said. “It was all us. We didn’t have to go down to the white community for nothing, we had everything that we needed right there in the Second Ward.”
Then, in another racial conflagration, “Pine Street just went up in flames,” he said.
Today, Pine Street is a center for community empowerment, heritage tourism, and historic preservation. In 2012, it was officially recognized as the Pine Street Neighborhood Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, preserving its legacy of African American history for years to come.
In 2017, Eastern Shore Network for Change launched “Reflections on Pine,” a four-day event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Cambridge Riot of 1967 that culminated with a unity walk and worship service at Bethel AME Church.
Two years later, the organization obtained a $100,000 grant to support the church’s revitalization projects, including repairing its leaky roof.
“My commitment to the church is to make sure it’s going to be here for generations after I’m gone,” Dion Banks said.
In recent years, the church has continued its legacy of activism and community advocacy.
Rev. Devan Martin, who pastored Bethel AME Church from 2024 to 2026, introduced a reading program to improve the literacy rates of adults and children in the county as well as a weekly free lunch program that was inspired by the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School Program in the ’60s and ’70s.
He also oversaw the restoration of the church’s historic sanctuary, which sustained significant water damage to the ceiling, pews, and walls that left the sheet rock cracked and crumbling and the wall discolored.
Under his leadership, the church hosted Gov. Wes Moore on Juneteenth 2025 as he announced a $400 million state funding initiative to address historical inequities, according to the Dorchester Star. The funding targets over 400 “Just Communities” or historically underserved neighborhoods impacted by mass incarceration, redlining, and urban renewal across Maryland, including Cambridge.
And the disparities aren’t just historical, as Bethel remains at the forefront of social change in Cambridge. “There’s still a lot of, to me, a lot of prejudice and segregation in Dorchester County,” Guinervere said. “Some of it is undercover, some of it is openly. You can’t sugarcoat what’s here when you live here and see it.”
“Bethel has always had that reputation of being the church where the status quo is never an option,” Dion Banks said.
But, Bethel is subject to many of the same trends as other churches around the country. With an aging population and fewer young people staying in the area, the church’s membership has dropped.
“We used to have, I guess, close to 200 that are in our church. Now we’re down to very few. The young people is moving on to the city, and the older people is, you know, dying out. But we’re still going strong,” Guinervere said. “Hope that we can rebuild with membership. Hope that we can rebuild, people who will come back.”
Despite that, the congregation still stands as a living testament to the church’s deep roots in the community.
“I hope that Bethel AME Church can still be as strong as it’s always been,” Sampson said. “I hope that the generation behind me will take the torch and run with it.”
Guinervere’s great-niece, 12-year-old Zakiyah Sampson, is doing just that.
Having attended the church since she was a baby, she has participated in several service projects including distributing backpacks to families in need and handing out Gatorade and water to athletes during the IRONMAN 70.3 Eagleman Triathlon in Cambridge.
Sampson said she wants to continue her church’s legacy of advocacy in the community.
“[I want] to keep helping people in need,” Zakiyah said.
At a recent service with the recently appointed Rev. Keesha Gardner-Gunbek — the first woman to pastor the church in its 179-year history — she urged the church to carry on its legacy of bringing hope to the town’s residents.
“We got to be the light in the community.”