Peering Through Century-Old Windows
Mount Zion Black Cultural Center is using art to promote collaboration, preservation, and social change.
Story by Darcie Zudell
Photos by Pearl Spurlock and Provided by Ahmed Hamed
Design by Ally Parker
One day in 2022, while walking along North Congress Street, Ahmed Hamed, a recent Ohio University graduate, felt drawn to a building across the road. At the time, Hamed was an OU student, pursuing his master’s degree in communications and development through the Center for International Studies. Originally from Cairo, Egypt, Hamed remembers wanting to familiarize himself with Athens and the culture of his university.
Out of curiosity, Hamed went to the building to find out its purpose and to see if it was open. When Hamed realized he could not get into the building, he soon discovered windows he could look through.
“I looked through the windows and I found it very beautiful inside,” Hamed says.
Entranced by the beauty of the interior, Hamed used his passion for photojournalism to capture what he saw. He took a photo of the view outside from his camera and shared it on a Facebook group called “Living in Athens.” The caption of the photo inquired what the building was used for.
After Hamed posted his photos online, members of the Facebook group were quick to point out that he had taken pictures of the interior of Mount Zion. This building was once a lively church built by and for the Black community in Athens, known as Mount Zion Baptist Church.
After discovering the community's pride in preserving the former church, Hamed became interested in Mount Zion's presence in Athens. Hamed's photojournalism is closely linked to activism. He describes his photography as street photography, which involves capturing candid moments of everyday life in public places. His passion for using activism to preserve historical heritage sites led him to focus his master’s thesis on Mount Zion.
“I was doing activism in Cairo and was working to raise awareness with the local community on history and heritage sites,” Hamed says. “It was interesting. I did not imagine that I would have the space [in Athens] to do my project on preserving heritage. I think it's a big portion of the work. A lot of photographers work on documenting heritage sites and raising awareness within the community to preserve it.”
Hamed became even more invested in focusing his work on Mount Zion when Mount Zion Baptist Church Preservation Society’s director of communications and media, Dr. Tee Ford-Ahmed, messaged him on Facebook after seeing the photo he had published.
“I was startled,” says Ford-Ahmed in recounting when she first saw Hamed’s Facebook post. Ford-Ahmed initially believed the photo was taken from inside and was concerned.
“We know everything in there is toxic … we even cover our shoes, so we won’t walk it into our car or in our house,” Ford-Ahmed says. “I had the key and Miss Ada had a key. I said, ‘Miss Ada, did you let anybody in the church?’”
When Dr. Ada Woodson Adams, the president of Mount Zion Black Cultural Center, said she did not let anyone in the building, Ford-Ahmed messaged Hamed and asked him to meet her for coffee.
After agreeing to meet, Hamed eased Ford-Ahmed’s concerns by revealing that he took the photo through the building’s windows and had not gone inside. After telling Ford-Ahmed about his passion for activism and how he wanted to focus his thesis on preserving cultural heritage sites, she arranged for him to safely photograph the inside of the building.
Hamed’s photos captured the state of the building in 2022. The paint on the walls was cracked and there was rubble scattered on the floor. Despite the natural weathering, beautiful stained-glass windows illuminate the frames of many of Hamed’s photographs. Hamed captured photos inside of Mount Zion in 2022 and 2023, getting the opportunity to take one of the last photographs of the beautiful stained-glass windows before they were removed from the building and safely put into storage.
Hamed took pictures of Mount Zion and converted them into a photo exhibit that he sold to various libraries in Athens County. Currently, he works as an intern for Mount Zion and uses his photography skills to document protests and raise awareness about various social causes.
The stained-glass windows were removed in the summer of 2023 after one window fell and shattered beyond repair.
“The grant that I had gotten from the Smithsonian was entitled, ‘Putting Mount Zion on Solid Ground,’” Ford-Ahmed says. “And that meant going into the basement, getting rid of the water and starting to work on the basement.”
While working on the building renovations, Ford-Ahmed and other volunteers soon realized that if they worked on the building, the stained-glass windows had a high risk of falling out because they were extremely old and fragile.
“So, I went back to the Smithsonian and wrote, ‘Oops,’” Ford-Ahmed says. “’We're a volunteer board that does not know what we're doing. Can we divert that money toward removing the windows?’”
The Smithsonian allowed Mount Zion to reallocate grant funds to carefully remove the priceless stained-glass windows from the building. Coincidentally, that same year, in 2022, the Stained-Glass Association of America held a conference in Toledo, Ohio.
Ford-Ahmed reached out to Nzilani Glass Conservation, a company that is qualified to create new or preserve historical glass works, to see if anyone on their team could look at Mount Zion’s windows. Representatives from Nziliani visited Athens to inspect the windows. Some even stayed overnight to have more time for the inspection.
“They sent back a 54-page booklet report that showed us stuff that we never saw about the windows,” Ford-Ahmed says. “Even the stuff that holds the stained glass together. It's like a rubber band. It was really vulnerable.”
After considering the cost and logistics of hiring Nziliani to remove the stained-glass windows, the board concluded that the center lacked the resources to undertake the project at that moment. Ford-Ahmed explains that it would have cost the center $800 a month to pay for the cost of storage to preserve the windows after they were removed.
Nziliani Glass Conservation refused to abandon Mount Zion. Their founder, Ariana Makau, reached out to another female-owned glass firm, Blind Eye Restoration, based in Columbus, Ohio.
“[It] took them a month to get them all out,” Ford-Ahmed says regarding Blind Eye Restoration’s process of removing the windows, “And thank God our mayor [Steve Patterson] said, ‘look, we have a huge mausoleum at the Union Street Cemetery that we’ll give to Mount Zion to store those windows.’”
As a former member of the Mount Zion congregation, Woodson Adams credits her dedication to preserving Mount Zion to the legacy and ancestry of the church, as well as her faith.
“We knew it was an important legacy for the people who had come before us,” Woodson Adams says. “And they built this monument for a reason. And this is because they wanted to say to the community at large, ‘we are here, we have a presence in this community.’”
In the summer of 2022, OU demolished Scott Quadrangle, a historical building most notably credited as the first residence hall on campus located on College Green. This decision was met with pushback from the Athens Historic Preservation Commission, a group dedicated to repurposing historic buildings rather than destroying them. The group wrote a resolution to former OU president, Hugh Sherman, pleading for more time to evaluate what the building could be repurposed for.
The demolition of Scott Quad also frustrated Hamed, who argues that preserving historical buildings such as Scott Quad and Mount Zion will bring the community together while also attracting others to the area.
“It’s cheaper to demolish it,” Hamed says. “Okay, you will see that money today, but for the next generation, you lose the local assets.”
Hamed and others believe that not preserving Mount Zion erases more than just a building; it erases a pivotal chapter in the community's history. Beyond its role as a social center, Mount Zion stood as a beacon of hope and resilience during the tumultuous era of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 60s.
“When I was growing up in the church, the church was the social center of all black activity,” Woodson Adams says. “It's important to stress the fact that people don't realize that we were segregated and discriminated against and some things were separate.”
At the time of writing, the stained-glass windows are still safely kept away, revealing the bare wooden planks that supported the glass for many years. Mount Zion fully plans on restoring the windows and adorning them back on the building following renovations, Ford-Ahmed says.
In the meantime, the Mount Zion Black Cultural Center is working with Passion Works Studios, a non-profit art studio aimed to inspire the human spirit through the arts, and local muralist, Keith Wilde, to create a mural to replace the stained-glass windows while the building is being renovated.
Wilde, who specializes in large-scale art, has designed a mural for Mount Zion to celebrate the church's origins and highlight heroes in regional Black history. Wilde envisions the mural to be made from faux stained glass to emulate the aesthetic of Mount Zion’s famous stained-glass windows.
“What we're going to do here is have community experiences where people can come in for workshops, and then we're going to paint on this particular material that will then be cut down,” Patty Mitchell, the founder of Passion Works Studios, says. “So we'll kind of do a big collaborative painting together. It'll be cut down and then laminated or fused onto the wood into the faux glass.”
Passion Works Studios organized its first workshop on Feb. 1 with Wilde. The volunteers were asked to cut out fragments of painted material that would be used in Wilde's mural. This was not the first time Passion Works Studios has partnered with Mount Zion. The organization has been working with the center for years and has been sending portions of sales from certain artworks directly to Mount Zion.
“Our mission is to collaborate and to be a stronger community,” Mitchell says. “We’re neighbors, right? We love Athens and it's such a deep part of our history. We want to use our space as a meeting space, until that you know, the day when things can happen within that social space [Mount Zion Black Cultural Center].”
Woodson Adams has always counted on her faith and support from the community to overcome tough times. When the first stained-glass window broke, when they had to sell the historic pews of Mount Zion and in other instances, the guidance of ancestors and the kindness of the community helped Mount Zion and its members and volunteers persevere.
Woodson Adams is inspired by Dr. Francine Cheryl Childs, the first tenured Black professor at OU, who emphasized the power of collaboration in promoting social change. Childs created Mount Zion’s famous choir when she asked her students if they would go to the church and sing, Woodson Adams says. Starting from nothing, Childs was able to create even more of a sense of community for those attending the Mount Zion Baptist Church.
“One of the members of that choir is now on our board,” Woodson Adams says. “It’s all falling into place. People make a difference. So, when times get hard, you lead into your prayer and know that people will help you get through it.”