Mt. Pleasant AME Church

08/30/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1CEwEsvQQp/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Shorter College in North Little Rock, Arkansas, was founded in 1886 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church — one of the most consequential institutions in Black American life, which had long understood that education and liberation were inseparable. When the Arkansas state university system excluded Black students entirely, the AME Church built its own college. Shorter has been operating ever since. 📚

The college sits on a small campus in North Little Rock, and its history is a compacted version of the entire story of Black higher education in the Jim Crow South: underfunded, underappreciated by the institutions of white power, and absolutely essential to the communities it served. Generations of Black Arkansans who could not attend the University of Arkansas attended Shorter. They became teachers, ministers, nurses, and professionals in a state that preferred they become nothing. 🌟

Shorter College is still open. It remains a two-year institution affiliated with the AME Church, and it occupies a specific and irreplaceable niche: a historically Black college that never stopped being what it was founded to be, in a state where the founding was an act of defiance.

08/23/2026

08/09/2026

Today, we celebrate 143 years of God’s faithfulness to Mount Pleasant African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The historical record places our beginning in 1883—only eighteen years after slavery had been abolished in this nation. It was a remarkable but difficult time for Black people in Arkansas.

In 1883, Black Arkansans were building churches, organizing schools, publishing newspapers, creating businesses and mutual-aid organizations, and serving in the state legislature. Here in Pine Bluff, Branch Normal College—the institution we now know as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff—was preparing Black men and women to become teachers.

Yet freedom remained fragile. Racial violence threatened Black communities, and the United States Supreme Court weakened the civil-rights protections that Reconstruction had promised.

It was in the midst of both progress and opposition, possibility and persecution, hope and hardship, that our ancestors planted Mount Pleasant A.M.E. Church.

They understood that the Black church had to be more than a Sunday meeting place. It had to be a sanctuary for the weary, a school for the mind, a training ground for leadership, a center of community life, and a beacon of hope.

For 143 years, generations have prayed here, worshipped here, raised their children here, buried their loved ones here, and trusted God here.

Today, we stand rooted in their faith. We rise in renewed hope. And we accept our responsibility to remain a beacon of transformation for our church and for the city of Pine Bluff.

To God be the glory for the great things He has done—and for 143 years of Mount Pleasant A.M.E. Church!

08/05/2026

07/18/2026

Good morning all. The work on the church will be postponed until next weekend. A lot of items were out of stock. I didn't get the notification until last night.