Jacob Tapisco

BACKGROUND: Reverend Jacob Tapsico was a lay leader among Philadelphia’s free Black founders, part of the same generation of leadership as Absalom Jones, James Forten, William White, and James Champion. He co-authored, with Richard Allen, The Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1817), among the first books published by African Americans in the United States, which became the new denomination’s foundational governing text. No birth or death date for Tapisco was located across the primary and secondary sources checked for this document.

THEOLOGY: In April 1816, Tapisco was one of sixteen delegates five of them representing Philadelphia, alongside Richard Allen, Clayton Durham, James Champion, and Thomas Webster, who met to organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination, the first of its kind founded by African Americans in the United States. The following year, he represented the Philadelphia churches at the new denomination’s first Annual Conference, held in Baltimore in April 1817, and returned as a Philadelphia representative to the second Annual Conference in April 1818. At that 1818 conference, Tapisco served alongside Richard Williams and Edward Williamson on a committee appointed to hear and try a disciplinary charge brought against Rev. Daniel Coker, among the earliest recorded instances of internal church governance in the new denomination. That same year, upon Richard Allen’s elevation to bishop, Tapisco succeeded him as pastor of Mother Bethel, a post he held until 1824.