This photograph was taken by William Vestal in the early 1950’s of the Second Baptist Church congregation.

The Second Baptist Church was the first African American church in Redlands, California, established in 1892 and located on Stuart Avenue in the heart of the city’s African American community.

Reverend Charles Hopkins (pictured first row, center) was a member of the Paul Quinn College gospel singers in Texas and was instrumental in bringing the gospel tradition to Redlands.

Hopkins trained and mentored generations of young people at the Second Baptist Church to sing gospel and complex multi-part harmonies keeping these traditions alive in the Stuart Avenue neighborhood.

Some of those he trained would go on to have careers in music including Clabe Hangan (pictured as a child second row, third from left), a professional folk musician and music educator in the Inland Empire, and Clarence Butler (pictured as a child sixth row, fourth from right) who performed with The Mu-Tonic Singers quartet.

In 2021, Marcella "Susie" Pruitt Grier unearthed this photograph in her family’s personal collection and it was digitized as part of the "Bridges That Carried Us Over Project: Documenting Black History in the IE," a community-based collaborative initiative designed to document the presence, contributions, and history of the African American community in the Inland Empire.

California State University, San Bernardino’s Special Collections & University Archives is home to the “Bridges That Carried Us Over Digital Archive” (https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/bridges-project/) and also houses the University’s collection of rare books, archives, photographs, maps, ephemera, and other unique materials. Its holdings include university archives, local/regional history, history of water in the western United States, pulp fiction, aerial photography, and a growing collection of comic books and graphic novels.

Please visit https://www.csusb.edu/special-collections for more information.

For a more details on the photograph visit https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/bridges-photographs/319/