Cory United Methodist Church became an icon of Cleveland’s civil rights movement as one of the city’s largest Black-owned churches during the 1960s, hosting events for national, local, and grassroots organizations including the Fair Employment Practices Committee, NAACP Cleveland Branch, Cleveland Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and United Freedom Movement. It became an influential civil rights platform that hosted speakers including activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in 1950, civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall in 1951, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. several times between 1963 and 1968. On May 14, 1963, when thousands packed the sanctuary and surrounding streets to hear King, he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he had never seen a “more aroused response … than I’ve seen in Cleveland, Ohio, tonight.” CORE brought Malcolm X and author Louis Lomax to speak there on April 3, 1964, and from its pulpit Malcolm X delivered the first iteration of his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech. Originally designed by architect Albert F. Janowitz for the Anshe Emeth Beth Tefilo congregation, the building served as the Cleveland Jewish Center from 1922 to 1945, was purchased by the Methodist congregation in 1946, has also housed the Glenville Recreation Center since 1961, continued its tradition of community programming promoting equity and education more than 75 years later, and was designated a local landmark by the Cleveland Landmarks Commission in 2012.
