This rectangular brown brick church with a projecting gabled portico has a flared hipped roof and a square castellated corner tower with cast-concrete quoins. One of Friendship’s founders in 1869 was the Reverend Thomas W. Stringer, Mississippi’s first black legislator, who established many black Masonic lodges. Stubblefield is unknown in the state except for this building, but he may be the person listed in the 1920 census in Lee, Arkansas, as “mulatto contractor.”
Opposite at number 115, First Baptist Church was built in 1918 and remodeled in 1954. This red brick Gothic Revival church takes a familiar form for black churches both urban and rural with two castellated towers framing the central gable, round-arched windows, and a recessed porch. As the town’s largest black meeting space, First Baptist accommodated graduations until the 1950s and music concerts. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson both spoke here, and in 1964 the church was the headquarters for the Freedom Summer registration drives.
Nearby at 404 Yazoo Avenue, the red brick, Colonial Revival Haven United Methodist Church, begun in 1906 and completed in 1923, includes a pedimented tetrastyle Tuscan portico and a square tower with an octagonal spire. Albert N. Dobbins, a Philadelphia-based architect for the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Bureau of Architecture, designed the building, and Frank P. Gates supervised construction by African American builder Charles A. Bunch (b. 1881), who lived one block away on Ashton Avenue. NAACP leader Aaron Henry was a member, and the church hosted numerous meetings in the 1960s to organize civil rights activity.