Noelle Trent

And so what that means for the museum is they're going to be able to use this money to study and educate the public about the history of black Christianity in this region in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I spoke to museum president and CEO, Dr. Noelle Trent, and she explained that when it comes to black Christianity north of the Mason-Dixon line, it really hasn't been studied very closely beyond Philadelphia.

A lot of the studies on black Christianity so far have focused on the south, but now we're going to get a chance to see what it was like and how it developed in the north, specifically here in our region.

When we think of figures like Martin Luther King Jr., and this is what Dr. Trent was telling me, we think of him as a reverend.