Richard Allen

Richard Allen was born into slavery and sold as a child with his family to a farmer in Delaware. At seventeen he was converted by Methodist preachers who denounced slavery, and his enslaver, persuaded by them, let Allen buy his freedom. He worked as a wagon driver, a laborer, and a traveling preacher, and in 1786 settled in Philadelphia, where St. George's Methodist Church invited him to preach to its Black members at dawn services.

As the number of Black worshipers grew, the white trustees moved to segregate them. One Sunday, probably in 1792, an usher pulled Allen's friend Absalom Jones off his knees during prayer and ordered the Black members to the gallery. They finished the prayer and walked out together. Allen and Jones had already founded the Free African Society in 1787, a mutual-aid group, and in 1794 Allen opened Bethel Church in a converted blacksmith shop he hauled to a lot he had bought.

White Methodist officials spent two decades trying to control Bethel and its property. Allen fought them in the courts and won. In 1816 he called together Black Methodist congregations from several cities and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States, and was consecrated its first bishop. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 he and Jones organized Black Philadelphians to nurse the sick and bury the dead and then published a pamphlet refuting a white writer's charge that they had profited from the crisis.

Allen used his church and his home to shelter people escaping slavery, and in 1817 he hosted a mass meeting where some three thousand Black Philadelphians rejected the American Colonization Society's plan to send free Black people to Africa. America was their home, they said. He died in 1831. Mother Bethel still stands on the same ground, and the AME Church, with millions of members in the United States and abroad, became a pillar of Black civic life and of the civil rights movement.