A movement had been building inside the Methodist Episcopal Church, South since 1866 to let its Black members, most of them formerly enslaved and worshipping in congregations their white bishops still controlled, organize a fully separate church of their own. It reached its conclusion on December 16, 1870, in Jackson, Tennessee, when the new body was constituted as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America. Two Black preachers, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst, were elected its first bishops and ordained by Robert Paine, the senior bishop of the church they were leaving, so the new denomination began with an unbroken line of ordination even as it broke administratively.
A brand new denomination still needs a doctrinal foundation on its first day, and this one did not write one from nothing. It kept the Articles of Religion already standing in Southern Methodism, John Wesley's own 1784 abridgment of the Church of England's Thirty Nine Articles, carrying the same twenty five articles forward as its own confession rather than drafting a new one to mark the separation. The break the new church made was administrative and racial, a Black denomination governing itself rather than being governed, not doctrinal, and it stands as the first Protestant denomination organized by African Americans in the South. The church took its present name, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1956, after more than eight decades under its founding name, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.