Sharing a neoclassical revival design and an architect with Canton’s white First Methodist congregation (1922; 3301 S. Liberty Street), Mt. Zion has three round-arched windows at the center of its brick facade but omits the tetrastyle portico seen at First Methodist. Middle-class African Americans mostly rejected the white columned architecture that evoked antebellum slavery. Brick piers support the small entrance porticos at each end of the facade. Inside, the roughly square sanctuary can be expanded by opening the folding door partitions of the Sunday School classrooms that encircle it.
Mt. Zion became known as the “Church of Refuge” the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination when the pastor, Ben-nie Luckett, convinced 1,200 students marching from Rogers High School toward police officers armed with tear gas on the square to enter the church for a peaceful mass meeting.