Richard Allen
Richard Allen was the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1816, which was the first independent black religious denomination in the US.
- Birth Date: February 14, 1760
- Death Date: March 26, 1831
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Spouse: Flora (m. October 1790; d. March 1801)
Sarah (m. August 1801; d. 1849)
Richard Allen was born into slavery to Benjamin Chew (1722-1810), a wealthy Philadelphia merchant. He was sold as a child along with his parents and three siblings to Mr. Stokeley Sturgis, a farmer in Delaware. Although he was a slave, his master was a humane person and permitted Allen to attend meetings of the Methodist Society led by circuit riders.
He taught himself to read and write, and at the age of 17 he became a Methodist. His master soon was convinced that slavery was morally wrong and offered him and other slaves to earn money to buy their freedom, which he did in 1780 and changed his name to Richard Allen. In 1784 he was qualified to preach at the first conference of the Methodist Church held in Baltimore, Maryland and he moved back to Philadelphia, which was a center for free blacks.
Allen, Richard. The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, originally published in Philadelphia in 1833, pp. 9-12. Read it on https://archive.org/details/lifeexperiencego1880alle/page/8/mode/2up
In 1786 he became a preacher at Saint George’s Methodist Episcopal Church but since it was a white church, he was restricted to early morning services. Soon afterward, the church’s vestry ordered them to find a separate area for their worship and in 1787 he relocated the black members of the church to a vacant lot where he would eventually build a church.
During this time he and fellow Methodist preacher Absalom Jones (1746-1818) formed the Free African Society (FAS) that assisted fugitive slaves and new free black migrants to Philadelphia. He converted a former blacksmith shop into a church and named it the AME Church and in 1799 he was ordained as the first black Methodist minister in recognition of his leadership and preaching. In 1816 he united four African American congregations in Philadelphia and founded the independent denomination of the AME Church, and in April of that year he was elected as their first bishop. From 1797 until his death at the age of 71, he and his wife operated a station on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves from the Southern states. The church was also instrumental in giving aid to migrating blacks from the South after the Civil War. The location of his church is now occupied by the Mother Bethel AME Church and is the oldest parcel of real estate in the US owned continuously by African Americans.
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