The African Methodist Episcopal Church traces its founding to an act of protest. In November 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, Black members of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, were interrupted mid-prayer and pulled from their knees by a trustee enforcing segregated seating. Allen and Jones led their congregation out that same year and organized the Free African Society, a mutual-aid body that was not itself a church. Allen's wing of the Society purchased a former blacksmith's shop, hauled it to a lot on Sixth Street, and dedicated it in 1794 as Bethel Church, still Methodist in doctrine and discipline but under Black lay control of its property, a point Allen had to defend in court against the white Methodist Episcopal Church's claims on the building.
By 1816, Bethel had been joined by sister Black Methodist congregations in Baltimore, Salem, and Attleborough, all of whom had likewise chafed under white oversight. Delegates from these churches met in Philadelphia that April and voted to unite as a wholly independent denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first fully independent Protestant body founded by Black Americans. They elected Allen their first bishop. The new church kept Methodism's connexional structure, itinerant preaching, and Wesleyan doctrine, but placed it entirely under Black leadership, a model that let the AME Church expand rapidly among free Black communities in the North even before the Civil War.