On a summer day in 2017, Pam Anderson was walking toward 7th and Westminster, an intersection in the Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, California, that she’d gotten to know well over nearly 70 years. She spotted her friend, Laddie Williams, sitting in front of a building on the corner—a building that served for many years as a refuge for family, tradition, and worship. “I said, Laddie, why you out there? What’s going on? And she said, Girl, you know what’s going on here? I just got a call… and they’re selling the church.”

Williams and Anderson were teenagers in 1968, when the First Baptist Church of Venice was constructed, but the congregation, made up primarily of Black and Hispanic members, has been