Friendship Baptist Church is Atlanta's first autonomous Black Baptist congregation, with a history intertwined with emancipation, Black education and the beginnings of institutions that would become Spelman and Morehouse Colleges. This might be one of the churches on this list whose story surprises people the most. Friendship helped build Black Atlanta. Literally.

Its story begins during slavery. In 1862, while the Civil War was still being fought, twenty-five enslaved Black Atlantans obtained permission to organize an independent church under Rev. Frank Quarles. It became Atlanta's first autonomous African American Baptist congregation. But then the story gets even bigger. An old railroad boxcar served both as a place of worship and as a classroom for early Atlanta University students. When Morehouse College moved from Augusta to Atlanta in 1879, classes were held at Friendship. In 1881, Spelman College began in the basement of Friendship's former church site.

Read that again. Spelman started in the basement of a Black church. That's Atlanta. Faith, education, institution-building and Black self-determination weren't separate stories here. They grew together. Even Friendship's modern location tells another chapter of Atlanta history. The congregation sold its historic Mitchell Street property in 2013 to make way for what became Mercedes-Benz Stadium, worshipped temporarily at Morehouse, and opened its current Walnut Street sanctuary in 2017.

Today, Friendship is led by its eighth pastor, Rev. Dr. Kelly Miller Smith Jr., himself a Morehouse graduate who once attended Friendship while in college. That's a full-circle Atlanta story if we've ever heard one.