Cleveland’s Olivet Institutional Baptist Church is the newest site to be recognized for its role in the city’s civil rights movement.
The Cleveland Civil Rights Trail, organized by the Cleveland Restoration Society, honors sites of significance focusing on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Under the leadership of Rev. Odie Hoover, Olivet served as a meeting point for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when he visited Cleveland, and members of the church's leadership, including former Pastor Otis Moss Jr., who participated in the Selma to Montgomery march.
"It was politically incorrect for [Hoover] to open the doors of Olivet and give Dr. King a home in Cleveland to carry on the work of liberation," Moss said. "There were those who possibly wanted to do this, but they were afraid. Dr. Hoover knew that it should be done, it could be done and he did it."
The church's relationship with King, and connection with Black residents, activists and other churches led to voter mobilization that played a role in the election of Carl Stokes as Cleveland’s first Black mayor, said Margaret Lann, the restoration society's director of preservation services and publication.
"It was an interfaith effort," Lann said. "They all were working together to help push for civil rights and really specifically to help bring out voters to elect Mayor Carl Stokes."
Under the leadership of Hoover and Moss, the church participated in local and national movements, including Operation Bread Basket — a protest of retailers that raised prices for Black customers or refused to hire Black employees.
Pastor Jawanza Colvin has lead Olivet for the last 15 years. Working with members of the congregation who participated in Olivet's grassroots activism is essential to continuing the church's legacy, he said.
"I am very fortunate to have many of those who marched with Dr. King, worked with Dr. King, served with Dr. King — and in very pivotal moments in the civil rights movement — to still be a part of this congregation, still active in their own way," Colvin said. "They've seen some very darker days than we are experiencing right now, and so to see them, you see you living hope."
The church is the eighth site on the trail, joining Glenville High School where Dr. King spoke to students, the African American Cultural Gardens, along with Cory United Methodist Church and Greater Abyssinia Baptist Church Lann said were gathering spaces essential to the city’s activism.
"That’s why we happen to have so many churches on our trail," she said, "because those were natural gathering spaces for a lot of grassroots efforts and important leaders of the movements to come in and provide education and inspiration."
Cleveland Restoration Society hopes these markers will educate the community on the historic role Black churches play in the city’s history, Lann said.
"That just goes back in general to the historic importance of the Black church, not only in Cleveland, but throughout the country," she said. "This was a place where people could gather to discuss issues of the day, be educated and they were free to do so."
