For much of the time when the Trumps were members, black families could attend, but not join—the church didn’t start integrating until the late 1950s and early ’60s. As families left the neighborhood and moved out to the suburbs, participation dropped. Membership had dipped below 100 people around the time Donald Trump moved to Manhattan following his stints in military and business school.
But the congregation came back, led by a pastor named Raymond Swartzback, who explicitly focused on reaching out to the new, comparatively poorer immigrant communities of Jamaica. Unlike other churches that are part of Presbyterian Church USA, which is roughly 90 percent white, First Church became an almost exclusively black and brown congregation—a big change from its days as the religious home of mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class Baby Boom families. O’Connor himself is from Jamaica—the island, not the neighborhood. Many of his congregants hail from Guyana, Trinidad, and other Latin American and Caribbean nations.
Read Full Article »