Naomi Nightingale

by Naomi Nightingale  “We Ain’t Done Yet”

I was astonished to see the once-visible stained-glass windows of the First Baptist Church of Venice boarded up. With my eyes still wide with surprise, I stopped at the 7th and Westminster Avenue stop sign and turned my head to get a better view of the front of the Church. Another surprise! Celia Williams (Laddie) sat alone on the Church steps. Gospel music wafted from her car parked at the curb a few feet from where she sat. It was Donnie McClurkin singing Stand.

Laddie said she was protesting the sale and potential destruction of the First Baptist Church of Venice (FBCV), a Church with a legacy of more than 100 years in the Oakwood neighborhood where she was born and raised. We were seated on the steps of the third generation of the First Baptist Church of Venice. The first, I’m told, was an old barn on the corner of 4th and San Juan Avenue and the second of the Churches, directly across from where we sat, was built on land donated by Arthur Reese, one of the Black ground-breaking immigrants from the racist south and its Jim Crow segregation laws and settled in Venice in 1905 with his cousin, Irving Tabor.

Pastor E. L. Holmes, minister of FBCV for 45 years passed away in 1999 after which several temporary pastors led the congregation until Horace Allen was assigned as Pastor in 2006. In 2015, Jay Penske, of the wealthy Penske family and publisher of Variety and Rolling Stones magazine, bought the Church from the imposter pastor who took out millions of dollars of equity from the debt-free Church and in the end opted to sell out the congregation and the community for his personal gain.
Penske planned to convert the Church and the five connected lots into a massive mansion out of mass and scale with the small Venice beach community, particularly the 1.5-mile Oakwood neighborhood. In 2017 the congregation lost the legal contest over the sale of the Church. The loss was devastating, not only to the members of the Church but also to community members – one in particular.

I thought, here we sit, contemplating the post-battle of this devastating blow — the battle that begins when all else has failed but the protesting spirit says, “We ain’t done yet!” That Sunday in April 2017, I knew that wherever I was heading earlier was no longer important. So, with a confirming sigh, I sat with Laddie.

It was the beginning of the gathering of the Original Save Venice group who met on the Church steps nearly every Sunday for five years planning, coordinating, teaching, protesting, praying and confirming our resolve to keep First Baptist Church of Venice and its legacy the cornerstone and anchoring monument it has been to the Venice Oakwood community for more than a century. On September 29, 2021, the Los Angeles City Council granted the First Baptist Church of Venice cultural-historic designation.

Amen.