First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

This Cass Avenue church started as two separate congregations. The Universalist Church of Our Father put up the current Neo-Gothic building in 1916, on land bought a few years earlier at Cass and Prentis. Detroit's Unitarians, pushed out of their own building when Woodward Avenue was widened, moved in alongside them in 1932, and the two groups formally merged in 1934 to become the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of Detroit. In 1964, a Detroit housewife named Viola Liuzzo joined the congregation, drawn by its social-justice circle into the local NAACP and, the next year, into the civil rights movement itself. In March 1965 she drove to Alabama to help after the Selma march, shuttling marchers between Selma and Montgomery, and Ku Klux Klan members shot and killed her on Highway 80. The church still stands two blocks from Wayne State University and remains an active congregation today.

1. Built in 1916 for the Universalist Church of Our Father
2. Unitarians and Universalists merged here in 1934
3. Viola Liuzzo joined the congregation in 1964, a year before her murder
4. Stands two blocks from Wayne State University