Richard Allen, a Walkout That Founded a Denomination

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.