Absalom Jones

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen are usually told as one story, and for good reason: both were pulled from prayer at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in 1787, both had already co-founded the Free African Society earlier that year, and both went on to lead independent Black congregations out of the same episode of exclusion. Where their paths diverge is instructive. Allen kept his congregation within the Methodist tradition and eventually organized it into its own denomination. Jones, leading the larger share of the Free African Society's membership, sought affiliation instead with the Episcopal Church, founding the African Church of Philadelphia in 1794 on the condition, negotiated in advance, that the congregation would retain its own lay leadership and property while accepting Episcopal doctrine and governance. The diocese admitted the congregation as St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, and in 1795 ordained Jones a deacon; his ordination to the full priesthood followed in 1802, making him the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church, decades before the denomination would ordain another. Jones used the pulpit for more than pastoral care. His 1808 sermon marking the United States' abolition of the international slave trade argued that the God of scripture is a God of justice who does not overlook the oppression of the enslaved, and he was an active petitioner to Congress against slavery throughout his ministry. The two founding paths, Allen's new denomination and Jones's negotiated place within an existing one, remain the two enduring models for how Black congregations of the period secured self-governance within American Christianity.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In the summer of 1793 yellow fever swept Philadelphia, killing roughly a tenth of the city's population before autumn, a documented public health crisis distinct from the pulpit career his first article traces through 1808. Physician Benjamin Rush, working from an early and mistaken belief that Black Philadelphians were naturally resistant to the disease, appealed to Absalom Jones and Richard Allen to organize Black residents as nurses, gravediggers and cart drivers for a city whose wealthier residents were fleeing.

Jones and Allen answered directly, coordinating volunteers who nursed the sick, buried the dead and kept essential services running through the worst of the epidemic, work the two men later stated brought them into contact with upward of eight hundred sufferers, a documented civic undertaking distinct from the ordination and congregational history his first article covers. When the publisher Mathew Carey printed an account accusing Black nurses of profiteering from desperate white families, Jones and Allen answered in print, co-authoring A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in 1794, a documented public rebuttal distinct from anything in his career as a specifically religious leader.

That the same man remembered for negotiating an entire congregation's place inside the Episcopal Church spent the year before that negotiation organizing emergency nursing through a lethal epidemic and then defended his community's name in print against a widely read slander, marks the 1793 fever and its 1794 rebuttal as a documented case where Jones's civic and literary defense of Black Philadelphians preceded, and helped make possible, his standing to negotiate on the congregation's behalf soon after.