Richard Allen

Richard Allen was born into slavery in Philadelphia on the fourteenth of February 1760, the property of Benjamin Chew, the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He was sold with his family in 1768 to Stokeley Sturgis of Dover, Delaware. He converted to Methodism in 1777 and persuaded Sturgis to permit him to purchase his freedom in 1780 — Allen paid the redemption price of two thousand Continental dollars and sixty dollars in silver across the next five years through wood-cutting, brickyard work, and travelling preaching.

He returned to Philadelphia in 1786 and joined St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church as a preacher to its growing Black congregation. After the 1792 walkout from St. George's that he led alongside Absalom Jones (also placed in this archive), Allen organized Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first AME congregation — and was its founding pastor.

On the ninth of April 1816 Allen convened representatives of Black Methodist congregations from Baltimore, Wilmington, Salem, and Attleborough at Bethel Church in Philadelphia for the founding meeting of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first independent Black denomination in any country. He was elected its first bishop. He held the office from 1816 to 1831.

He led the AME through its first sixteen years across a denomination that grew from five congregations to over three hundred by 1830. He founded the first Black publishing imprint in the United States, the AME Book Concern. He hosted the first National Negro Convention at Bethel Church in September 1830.

He died in Philadelphia on the twenty-sixth of March 1831, age seventy-one.

He is honored here as the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the principal institutional architect of free-Black America.