The historically Black Protestant tradition has a starting point scholars agree on: a walkout. In 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, both formerly enslaved men worshipping at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, were pulled from their knees during prayer for kneeling in a section reserved for white congregants. They left, and with other Black members of St. George's formed the Free African Society the same year, a mutual aid and worship society that became the seed of the independent Black church movement in America. Allen went on to found Mother Bethel in 1794, and in 1816 he and fifteen delegates from Black Methodist congregations in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey organized the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Allen consecrated its first bishop, the first denomination in the United States founded and governed by African Americans.
The tradition's other historic denominations organized on their own separate timelines across the following century. James Varick led the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church to formal organization in New York in 1821. Three existing Black Baptist conventions merged into the National Baptist Convention at Atlanta's Friendship Baptist Church in 1895, splitting in 1915 into the National Baptist Convention, USA, Incorporated, and the National Baptist Convention of America. Charles Harrison Mason founded the Church of God in Christ in Mississippi in 1897. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's landmark study centers on these same seven denominations, plus the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and the Progressive National Baptist Convention, as the tradition's historic institutional core.