Richard Williams

BACKGROUND: Reverend Richard Williams was born in Maryland, in the first generation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and was among the earliest ministers to enter the Baltimore Conference — a distinction that made him, by the time his contemporaries came to write him into the record, one of the oldest ministers the Church had known. He was present at the denomination’s first Annual Conference, held in Baltimore on April 12, 1817, alongside Bishop Richard Allesico and James Champion attended as visitors from Philadelphia. Williams returned as a member the fn, who presided, and fellow ministers Daniel Coker, Edward Waters, and Henry Harden; Jacob Tapollowing year, at the second Annual Conference held April 14, 1818, where he served alongside Jacob Tapsico and Edward Williamson on a committee appointed to hear and try a disciplinary charge brought against Rev. Daniel Coker. Early in his ministry, he served as an assistant to Rev. Henry Harden at Bethel Church, Baltimore, alongside Edward Waters, who would later become the denomination’s third bishop. His ministry carried him widely through Delaware, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania, the same corridor of Mid-Atlantic cities where African Methodism was taking root and testing its reach. In 1837, Williams established an AME society in Rochester, New York, with twenty-six members, maintaining close ties to the Bethel AME congregation in Buffalo.

THEOLOGY: It was in Philadelphia, at Bethel Church, that Williams found the moment his life is now remembered by. Stationed there in 1840, he was present when the old church building was pulled down to make way for a new one, serving as pastor until 1844. Williams preached the first sermon delivered in the basement of that new church, a small but weighty distinction: his was the first voice to fill the replacement before the replacement was even finished being built. It placed him at a literal threshold in Mother Bethel’s history, present for the passing of one structure and the first words spoken inside the next.