The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church has an origin unlike the AME and AME Zion churches: it was not founded by a walkout from a segregated congregation, but organized after the Civil War with the formal, if self-interested, cooperation of the very denomination its founders were leaving. Before emancipation, roughly 200,000 enslaved and free Black people belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, worshipping in segregated galleries and mission stations. After the war most left for other churches or for the older independent Black Methodist bodies, but the Southern church's white leadership, eager to avoid a legal fight over property held for its Black membership, proposed helping organize a fully separate denomination instead.
Forty-one delegates, all formerly enslaved members of the Southern Methodist church, met in Jackson, Tennessee, on December 16, 1870, and organized the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America, adapting the Methodist Episcopal Church, South's own Discipline as a starting point for their own. Two bishops were consecrated to lead it, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst, both formerly enslaved ministers. It was the first independent Black Methodist denomination founded in the South rather than transplanted from the North, and it grew initially among Black communities across Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and neighboring states.