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.