Decades ago, this Detroit church redefined the term ‘Housewives’

March 8, 2026, 6:03 a.m. ET

Detroit’s Bethel A.M.E. Church has a long history of influential female members, including Rosa Parks and Dr. Betty Shabazz.
Women of the church founded impactful community organizations like the Housewives League of Detroit and the Fannie B. Peck Credit Union.
Many women from the congregation have achieved prominence in business, law, education, and civic leadership.
The church’s legacy of female leadership reflects the broader history of the A.M.E. denomination, which was the first to ordain a female bishop.

The Mother of the Modern Civil Rights Movement used to visit here for early Sunday morning services with a caregiver during her golden years.

And the future wife of a dynamic champion for human rights also worshipped here while growing up in Detroit’s North End.

This sacred Detroit place, founded in 1841 and now located at 5050 Richard Allen Boulevard, off Warren Avenue in Midtown, is Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. And the late Rosa Parks and Dr. Betty Shabazz, the wife of Malcolm X, were among the many people who have found fellowship and inspiration at the church during its illustrious history.

However, any celebration of impactful women connected to Bethel A.M.E. during Women’s History Month in March must go beyond reciting a few famous names that graced Bethel’s sanctuary. That’s because during the past 185 years, women affiliated with Bethel have made a host of profound contributions that have improved the lives of many in Detroit and beyond.

“Detroit women representing all walks of life made Bethel a beacon in the community,” Mildred Goodloe, a devoted steward and a 70-year member of Bethel A.M.E. Church, said. “Some of the women cleaned homes and hospitals. Some of the women were teachers and doctors and lawyers.

“But when they came together at church, everyone was equal. In those days, we came to church as families, and inside we were one family.”

Goodloe says that throughout Bethel’s history, the service performed by the church’s family of women often touched families and individuals beyond the church’s walls.

This was the case when the Housewives League of Detroit was founded in 1930 by Fannie B. Peck, the wife of William Peck, who was Bethel’s pastor from 1928 until his death in 1944. The Housewives League of Detroit — a partner organization of the Booker T. Washington Business Association founded in Detroit by the Rev. William Peck — was comprised of activist Black women, many of whom were Bethel members, that championed Black-owned businesses and Black employment across the Detroit workforce during a challenging period in the city’s history.

A full decade before the three-day Detroit Race Riot of 1943 — which cost lives, including the lives of Black people that were killed by police officers — members of the Housewives League of Detroit were bold enough to go out into their community, door-to-door, telling residents: “Don’t buy where you can’t work.”

The now-74-year-old Goodloe was too young to witness the early trailblazing work of the Housewives League of Detroit, which provided a model for the National Housewives League of America established in 1933. However, Goodloe did have firsthand contact for years with another institution started by Fannie B. Peck at Bethel, which operated as the Fannie B. Peck Credit Union opened in 1936.

The credit union, created to provide a stable financial institution that could be accessed by Bethel members and the surrounding community, operated for more than 80 years.

“Mrs. Fannie B. Peck was a humble but exceptional woman, and the credit union came right out of a Sunday School class she taught, when young people gave their offerings to get the credit union started,” said Goodloe, whose earliest personal recollections of Bethel go back to her school days when she was attending P.J.M. Hally Elementary (2585 Grove) and later William H. Peck Elementary (1600 Lawrence).

“The credit union started when our church was (on the corner) at Frederick (and St. Antoine) when everything that we would do outside now was done in the church,” she said. “The church was the center of the Black community then. And although we had far less than we do now, the women that poured into the young people did far more.”

During three consecutive days, beginning March 3, Goodloe spoke from the heart about other Bethel women who were experts when it came to doing “more with less” at church and in the community.

A tiny sampling of the women that Goodloe covered included Esther Gordy Edwards, the sister of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr., who helped him build the company and led efforts to turn the original Detroit Motown headquarters into a museum; Dr. Rosa Slade-Gragg, a former president of the National Association of Colored Women, an adviser to two U.S. presidents (John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson), and vice president of the Council of Women of the United States; Carrie Gray, a groundbreaker in the automotive industry, who held various engineering, development, planning and marketing positions with Ford and Chrysler, which led to her being honored by the Automotive Hall of Fame, and Helen Malloy, a Detroit businesswoman, a prominent member of the Housewives League of Detroit and the adoptive mother of Betty Jean Sanders, the future Dr. Betty Shabazz.

Another high-achieving woman with ties to Bethel — who Goodloe almost forgot to mention — is Pam Moore, but not due to a lack of pride.

Because, in addition to Moore being a National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Hall of Fame inductee in 2025, primarily for her award-winning work as a reporter and news anchor for 32 years at KRON-TV in San Francisco, Moore, who began her professional broadcasting career on the radio at Detroit’s WJLB, also is Goodloe’s sister.

One person who is well-versed about the people and stories that Goodloe shared is Norman Osborne, who was Bethel’s senior pastor for 22 years beginning in 1982. Osborne, who served longer than any pastor in Bethel’s history after being mentored by his predecessor, the Rev. Maurice Higginbotham, says the legacy of Bethel women is a tremendous source of inspiration, but not surprising.

“Second Baptist Church is the oldest Black church in the state and Bethel is the second oldest. And women have been important throughout Bethel’s history,” said the 79-year-old Osborne, who became acquainted up close with the quiet strength and grace of Rosa Parks during the 1990s when the Civil Rights icon — a longtime member of Detroit’s St. Matthew A.M.E. Church — would visit Bethel with her caregiver for services that started at 8 a.m.

“But women have also been a vital part of the A.M.E. Church from the very beginning. Jerena Lee (the first woman authorized to preach in the A.M.E. Church) was a contemporary of (Bishop) Richard Allen (the founder of the A.M.E. Church in 1794). We also were the first Black denomination to have a woman as a bishop (Vashti Murphy McKenzie). So, I think it’s in the DNA of the A.M.E. to have women leaders, and that has certainly been true at Bethel.”

But, while sharing and preserving Bethel’s history is important to Osborne and Goodloe, during the morning of March 5, Goodloe wanted to make it crystal clear that today’s congregation at Bethel, led by the Rev. Ernest NI’A, also is filled with women who share a commitment to service.

Like the women whose “shoulders they stand on,” Goodloe proudly says that her congregation includes many women that have distinguished themselves in and outside of the church, including Phyllis Hurks, director of Strategic Workplace Relations for the Great Lakes Water Authority and a 2026 “Notable Women In Law” selection by Crain’s Detroit Business; Michelle Reaves, executive director of the Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program (DAPCEP) and a recipient of the 2025 Annual Global Auto Mobility Industry Innovation Award for her service and leadership in STEM education, and Gayle Watson, a former senior manager at AT&T, who now uplifts and communicates with her community through her art, which has appeared in exhibits at the DIA.

While there are many more remarkable Bethel women — past and present — that Goodloe hopes Detroiters will become familiar with, an easier, and perhaps more beneficial task, would be to come away with a true understanding of what motivated the earlier generations of women to serve in so many ways.

“When I was growing up in the church, the women would pick us up and take us places to expose us to new things, and there wasn’t anything in the world that we didn’t think we could do because of those women,” said Goodloe, who used the encouragement she received from Bethel women growing up to become a career educator after graduating from Western Michigan University.

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