Richard Allen

• Born: February 14, 1760
• Birthplace: Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), Pennsylvania
• Died: March 26, 1831
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Religious leader

The founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Allen was a tireless minister and an advocate for moral betterment and racial equality.

Areas of achievement: Abolitionism; Religion and theology; Social issues

Early Life

Born February 14, 1760, in Pennsylvania, Richard Allen grew up a slave on a plantation belonging to Stokeley Sturgis in the vicinity of Dover, Delaware. The absence of records and Allen’s own silence in his autobiography make reconstruction of his early years difficult. Sturgis sold Allen’s mother and three siblings while Allen was enslaved. Allen remembered slavery as difficult, but living in Delaware, where nearly half of the African American population was free, persuaded him that slavery was not his destiny; while enslaved, Allen also learned to read and write.

Life’s Work

In January 1780, having embraced Methodism and wanting to convert other African Americans, Allen arranged to purchase his freedom, which he earned in August, 1783. He embarked on a career as an itinerant preacher in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Allen used Methodism as a tool to impeach the institution of slavery, even as the nascent United States was making it legally permanent. In the process, he came to the attention of Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in the United States, and white abolitionists in Philadelphia who wanted to use Allen’s career to illustrate their claim that abolishing slavery was not only a moral course of action but also a safe one.

These alliances brought Allen to Philadelphia, setting the course for much of his subsequent career. As a free man and moral agent answerable, in his view, to God, Allen wanted to pursue his religious calling on his own terms; white abolitionists and white ministers, even as they abhorred slavery, wanted to maintain ministerial oversight. Allen proved especially adroit as a broker, maintaining relations with white benefactors, especially with the Philadelphia Abolitionist Society, while he and Absalom Jones formed the Free African Society through which African Americans could pool their resources and promote the interests of African Americans independent of whites.

In the early 1790’s, Allen earned a living as a chimney sweep, merchant, and shoemaker, preaching often, while worshiping as a congregant at Philadelphia’s racially integrated St. George’s Church. Perhaps already desiring an African American-controlled church, Allen led a walkout from St. George’s when a sexton insisted that black members sit and pray in a segregated balcony. Allen established Bethel Church on property he purchased in 1791, with a blacksmith’s shop serving as an initial meetinghouse when regular worship commenced in 1794. Rather than submit to oversight by the white Methodist elders, Allen styled his congregation the African Methodist Episcopal Church, obtaining legal recognition from the state of Pennsylvania in 1796. Despite a rocky relationship with many white Methodists, Allen was ordained by Asbury in 1799. African American Methodism flourished along the Delaware River, and in 1816, Allen established the African Methodist Episcopal Church as a four-congregation denomination, the first African American denomination in the United States. Allen was its first bishop.

Rampant racism compelled Allen to broaden his activities. In 1794, he and Jones published a pamphlet defending African Americans against the unfounded accusations of Mathew Carey, a white economist and publisher, who claimed that African Americans had robbed white homes abandoned during an outbreak of yellow fever in 1793. Allen produced an addendum to the joint pamphlet titled An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves and Approve the Practice, arguing that abolitionism would yield a host of enlightened and valuable citizens from the ranks of the emancipated. In 1799, Allen added to his antislavery publications eulogies of George Washington, whom he praised a virtuous man because he freed his slaves in his will, and Warner Mifflin, a white abolitionist who had fought slavery in Delaware and Virginia. Ongoing racist attacks led Allen to consider a resettlement movement, in which African Americans would settle in newly independent Haiti, which he saw as a chance to build and enrich a nation that accepted African Americans as equal citizens. He continued to work for inclusion within the United States, organizing and hosting a Black National Convention at Bethel Church in September, 1830, to protest a wave of laws that limited the rights of free African Americans in Ohio and Illinois.

A voice for moral uplift, religious conversion, African American liberation, and human equality, Allen died on March 26, 1831.

Significance

Allen was both a leader and an important symbol for African Americans in Philadelphia and its environs during the early days of the United States, and for African Americans nationally ever since. Allen labored to gain acceptance for African Americans as citizens and Christians from the American Revolution until his death. By establishing the first African American religious denomination, publishing some of the first pamphlet literature by African Americans endorsing abolitionism, and forming an early mutual aid society, he was a founding father in the African American struggle with majority culture in the United States. He embodied the complex and contradictory impulses African Americans have experienced since the American Revolution. His flirtation with African American resettlement to Haiti presaged the back-to-Africa movement of Marcus Garvey, and his insistence that the United States live up to the equality promised in its Declaration of Independence foreshadowed the career of Martin Luther King, Jr. First and foremost, Allen was a Methodist preacher and bishop, whose primary task was the ministerial oversight and moral uplift of African Americans.

Bibliography

Allen, Richard. The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen. Philadelphia: Martin & Boden, 1833. A partial autobiography covering Allen’s life and religious exertions to 1816.

Andrews, Dee E. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. An insightful study of the urban and mid-Atlantic origins of Methodism and its appeal to common people.

George, Carol V. R. Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Rise of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Centers on Allen’s confrontation with white Methodism and his response in founding an African American-controlled institution.

Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2008. A modern life-and-times study of Allen’s career and its significance.

Payne, Daniel Alexander. A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Nashville, Tenn.: African Methodist Episcopal Church Sunday School Union, 1891. Focuses on Allen as a founding father in the hagiographic tradition.

Raboteau, Albert J. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African American Religious History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Corrects implications that Allen was motivated solely by a reaction to white racism. Allen emerges as a Methodist concerned about the welfare of unconverted African Americans.

Wesley, Charles Harris. Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1935. Emphasizes the Americaness of Allen while ignoring his flirtation with African American resettlement.