Richard Allen

BACKGROUND: Richard Allen was born enslaved in Philadelphia on February 14, 1760, in the household of attorney Benjamin Chew. He and his family were later sold to Stokeley Sturgis, a farmer in Delaware, and as a child his parents and a sibling were sold away from him. At seventeen, moved by the preaching of a traveling Methodist minister, Allen converted to Methodism; his conversion soon led Sturgis and other members of the household to convert as well, and Sturgis allowed Allen and his brother to hire themselves out to earn money toward purchasing their freedom, which Allen secured around 1780. Free, Allen worked as a woodcutter, brickyard laborer, shoemaker, and wagon driver, and traveled and preached throughout Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. In 1786, he settled in Philadelphia and joined St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, where he held early-morning services for the city’s Black congregants. He married twice: first to Flora, in 1791, and, after her death, to Sarah Bass, in 1805. Sarah, herself a formerly enslaved nurse and founder of a women’s missionary sewing society, worked alongside Allen throughout his ministry, and the couple raised six children together; their home at Lawrence Court served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Allen died in Philadelphia on March 26, 1831, at the age of 71, and was buried at Mother Bethel, where his remains lie today.

THEOLOGY: Frustrated by increasing restrictions placed on Black congregants at St. George’s — including an incident in which Allen, Absalom Jones, and other Black worshippers were forcibly pulled from their knees during prayer — Allen and Jones withdrew from the church in 1787 and, together with others, formed the Free African Society, Philadelphia’s first mutual aid organization for free Black residents. In 1793, during the yellow fever epidemic that killed more than 4,000 Philadelphians, Allen and Jones organized Free African Society members as nurses and aides at the request of physician Benjamin Rush; when a pamphlet by publisher Mathew Carey accused Black nurses of profiteering and theft, Allen and Jones responded the following year with their own account, becoming among the first Black writers in America to hold a copyright. In 1791, Allen purchased a lot at Sixth and Lombard Streets — still the oldest parcel of land continuously owned by Black Philadelphians — and in 1794 converted a former blacksmith shop there into Bethel Church, dedicated July 29, 1794. He was ordained a deacon by Bishop Francis Asbury in 1799, the first Black man ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Allen fought off repeated attempts by white Methodist authorities to bring Bethel back under their direct control, winning a decisive Pennsylvania court ruling affirming the congregation’s independence. On April 9–10, 1816, Allen convened a general conference at Bethel uniting five Black Methodist congregations from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland into the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first fully independent Black denomination in the United States — and was elected its first bishop. Bethel became known from that point as Mother Bethel.