JACKSON, Miss.—Pastor Samuel Boyd sat inside the Western Sizzlin off Highway 80 for lunch. Glancing outside the window by his seat, he noticed an old Holiday Inn rotting away. This dilapidated building sparked an idea that stemmed from his time serving as a pastor at Historic St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in New Orleans.
In 2000, the late Bishop Cornal Garnett Henning Sr. assigned Boyd to become the new pastor of Pearl Street AME Church in West Jackson, though the latter was not initially excited about returning to the metro. The move, however, opened up an opportunity for the AME church organization to begin doing work that they had already started in the Crescent City.
“In the ’90s, there were a lot of abandoned properties across the street from the (Historic St. James AME) Church,” Boyd described to the Mississippi Free Press. “It was blighted. It was bad for the church members coming in, driving in the church … and across the street, prostitution and everything would go on in there.”
By 1994, the church completed a $5-million renovation on the property, converting it into a 38-unit complex called St. James Homes.
This postcard from 1966 shows the Holiday Inn off Highway 80 in Jackson, Miss. The building will soon be transformed into an affordable-housing complex called The Pearl. Photo courtesy Gulf Coast Housing Partnership
Initially, Pastor Boyd wanted to turn the old property off Highway 80 into a headquarters for the southern region of the AME organization, but that plan did not pan out. But on the seventh day of the seventh month in 2007, at around 2 a.m., he received a message from God, he said.
“God gave me a vision to deal with possibly converting that place, if I could get it, into a home for seniors,” Pastor Boyd said. “Scripture tells us to write down the vision, make it plain and run with it. And that’s what we did.”
Sixteen years later, that vision is finally coming to fruition with The Pearl, a 72,000-square-foot affordable-housing complex for the elderly and disabled. The community will have