Paradise Baptist Church has reached its 160th year. The congregation marked the milestone with a Sunday anniversary service, and its history is now the subject of an exhibit at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. The church traces its start to Summerhill in 1865, and its story runs through some of the biggest changes the south side of downtown has seen.
The founder was a child. Dinah Watts Pace was 12 years old when, in the months after the Civil War, she began collecting the neighborhood's hungry and unattended children and teaching them about Jesus at the corner of Richmond and Martin streets in Summerhill. There was no building and no money behind it. Those Sunday meetings became the Pleasant Grove Sunday School, with planks set across crates standing in for pews.
In 1870 the Rev. Robert Epps came to Atlanta from Athens and began knocking on doors to build up the fellowship. On Oct. 26 of that year the group formally organized as Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. Not long after, a white real estate agent gave the congregation a brick church on Reed Street. Members cleared land and built homes around it, and the church took a new name, Reed Street Baptist Church.
A run of pastors shaped the congregation over the following decades. The Rev. C. O. Jones served 24 years. Edwin Posey Johnson and Ralph Riley followed. Then came Clifford Nathaniel Ellis, whose tenure lasted 46 years. Under Ellis the church ran bus ministries that went through neighborhoods picking up children, added an educational building and started new auxiliaries. His services went out over WSB as one of the first African American gospel radio broadcasts in the country, and he helped integrate the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium.
The church's Summerhill chapter ended in 1965, when the city took its land through eminent domain for Atlanta Fulton County Stadium. Ellis moved the congregation to a new home in northwest Atlanta, telling members they were moving rather than losing, and the church became Paradise Baptist Church.
Later pastors carried the work forward. The Rev. Edward Williams Lumpkin built his ministry on fellowship, evangelism, doctrine and stewardship. The Rev. James Bullard and the Rev. James Calloway kept the congregation growing, and the Rev. Jesse J. Walker II expanded its music and media work, adding newsletters and a website. Under Charles A. Harper III, an Atlanta native, the church has entered a new chapter with an emphasis on preserving its record.
Harper described the anniversary as a story of survival and calling, pointing to a congregation that has carried on through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement and the present day. He framed the church's history as a guide for the people who come after, evidence that earlier generations endured long odds through faith and community.
The Rev. S. Tarnace Watkins Sr., the executive pastor, spoke at the anniversary service about Pace, who came to be known as the "Mother of Orphans" and went on to found schools and care for children. He said Paradise has served as both a sanctuary and a launchpad for leaders since its first days.
The exhibit brings the church's archive to Auburn Avenue, where photographs, letters and hymnals tell the story from the Summerhill street corner forward. Anniversary co-chair Shaneeka Favors-Welch called the move a full-circle moment, saying the exhibit preserves the church's founding story permanently and shares it with a wider audience as a lesson in resilience and self-determination.
For downtown, the history is a reminder of what stood on the land before the stadium era in Summerhill, and of a congregation that started with a 12-year-old girl and a handful of children and is still gathering 160 years later.
Original reporting by Ann Hill Bond for Capital B Atlanta.