Daniel Payne, a Closed School and a Lifelong Argument for Education

Daniel Payne was eighteen when he opened a school in Charleston teaching free and, informally, enslaved Black children to read, write, and study scripture and geography. It ran for five years before South Carolina, alarmed in the wake of Denmark Vesey's planned uprising and Nat Turner's rebellion in neighboring Virginia, passed a law in 1834 making it a crime to teach any Black person to read. Payne closed the school and left the state rather than continue in secret, a decision that set the direction of the rest of his life: wherever he went afterward, building an educated Black clergy and Black educational institutions became his central project. Ordained first as a Lutheran minister, he transferred his energy into the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1841, where he argued, often against real resistance from preachers who valued spiritual calling over formal study, that an educated ministry served the denomination's people better than raw enthusiasm alone. Elected bishop in 1852, he had the institutional standing to act on the argument directly, and in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, he led the AME Church in purchasing Wilberforce University from the Methodist Episcopal Church, which could no longer sustain it after the war disrupted its Southern-oriented student base. Payne became its president, making him the first African American to lead a college in the United States, a role he held for sixteen years alongside his episcopal duties. His late-life History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church remains one of the fullest firsthand accounts of the denomination's growth from Richard Allen's founding congregation into a national institution, written by a man who had spent his own youth watching a schoolhouse door closed by law.