Richard Allen

Richard Allen bought his own freedom in his early twenties and built a life as a licensed Methodist preacher in a church whose founder, John Wesley, had condemned slavery, even as many of its American congregations remained segregated in practice. In Philadelphia, Allen and Absalom Jones organized the Free African Society in 1787, a mutual aid society outside any single church that pooled resources for the city's free Black residents. The turning point came at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church that same year: Allen and other Black worshippers, kneeling in prayer, were physically pulled up by ushers and told to move to a gallery set aside for them. Allen led his fellow worshippers out of the building and never returned. What followed was not an immediate break with Methodism itself, which Allen continued to identify with theologically, but a long campaign to build and defend a congregation Black Philadelphians controlled. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, still known today as Mother Bethel, was dedicated in 1794, and Allen spent the next two decades fighting off attempts by the white Methodist conference to claim authority over Bethel's property and clergy. In 1816, with several other Black Methodist congregations facing the same pressure, Allen brought them together to formally organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church as its own denomination, independent of white Methodist oversight, and was consecrated its first bishop. He would go on, later in his life, to grant a woman named Jarena Lee permission to preach within the denomination, itself a departure from Methodist practice of the time, and the church he founded became one of the most significant institutions in African American religious and civic life across the nineteenth century.

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 January 1817 roughly three thousand free Black Philadelphians filled Mother Bethel, the church Richard Allen had founded, for a mass meeting called to answer a specific proposal: the newly formed American Colonization Society's plan to resettle free Black Americans in a colony in West Africa, a documented public meeting distinct from the walkout and denomination founding his first article covers. Allen had not arrived at the meeting already opposed. Alongside fellow organizer James Forten, he had initially weighed the plan's stated benefits, a documented early openness distinct from the unbroken opposition to White Methodist authority that defines his first article's account of the Bethel property disputes.

The gathered congregation rejected colonization decisively and vocally, and Allen and Forten, listening to the community whose mass meeting they had convened, moved from tentative openness to firm and lasting opposition, a documented change of position distinct from anything in the account of Allen's founding of the AME Church as its own independent denomination. Allen's opposition afterward rested on a distinction he drew clearly: Black Americans, most of them born on American soil, held a claim to remain in it that colonization asked them to give up rather than defend.

That the man who founded an independent Black denomination to secure self-governance within American Christianity also convened, and was changed by, a mass meeting that rejected a plan to relocate Black Americans outside the country entirely, marks the 1817 Bethel meeting as a documented case where Allen's institutional project of building Black religious independence at home ran alongside a parallel, and ultimately decisive, argument for staying rather than leaving.