The Boston Globe, September 2025
St. Augustine’s African Orthodox church sits on Allston Street in Cambridgeport,a striking maroon wooden structure withstagger shingle siding,and stained glass mosaic windows. However, when Kris Manjapra first entered the church in 2012, its siding was gray wooden shingles, and daylight peeked through the wooden ceiling slats. It served a small congregation of 20. Manjapra said he could sense the church’s grandeur, but even then he could see it beginning to crumble.
In 2019, when Manjapra,Stearns Trustee professor of history at Northeastern University, finally became a member of the church, he worked with the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association as a grant writer on a restoration proposal to the Cambridgeport Historical Society to fix the church’s leaking roof. After they’d received the grant, Manjapra realized that fully reinvigorating the church would require more than fixing the roof; especially with the congregation steadily shrinking, a byproduct, he said, of the Black community being priced out of Cambridge by the area’s continued “hyper gentrification.”
The next year, Manjapra founded Black History in Action, Cambridge, a nonprofit dedicated to safeguarding, restoring, and revitalizing St. Augustine’s.
