Absalom Jones

Absalom Jones was born into slavery in Sussex County, Delaware, on the sixth of November 1746. His master Benjamin Wynkoop moved to Philadelphia in 1762 and Jones moved with him as a household servant. Jones taught himself to read using a New Testament he purchased at age sixteen. He purchased his wife Mary Thomas's freedom in 1770 and his own freedom in 1784 — having continued to work for Wynkoop on terms that allowed him to accumulate the redemption funds.

In April 1787 Jones and Richard Allen (also placed in this archive) co-founded the Free African Society in Philadelphia — the first mutual-aid and benevolent organization established and run by free Black Americans. The Society's role in the 1793 Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic — nursing white Philadelphians at the request of Dr. Benjamin Rush after the city's white nurses had fled — established the moral standing of free Black Philadelphia in early American civic life.

In 1792 Jones led a Black walkout from St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church after a sexton attempted to drag him from a pew at the front of the sanctuary. The walkout produced two new congregations: Allen's African Methodist Episcopal denomination, and Jones's African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, founded in 1794 — the first Black Episcopal congregation in the United States.

Jones was ordained deacon in 1795 and priest on the twenty-first of September 1804 — the first African American Episcopal priest. He served St. Thomas until his death and was active in abolitionist organizing through the early 1800s.

He died in Philadelphia on the thirteenth of February 1818, age seventy-one.

He is honored here as the first African American Episcopal priest and a co-founder of free-Black mutual aid in America.