Richard Allen
Detail of Richard Allen, "From the plantation to the Senate," lithograph by Gaylord Watson, 1883 (Library of Congress)
Richard Allen (1760–1831) was the founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Born into slavery, Allen converted to Methodism as a teenager and began preaching in his early twenties. He bought his own freedom in 1786 and moved from Delaware to Philadelphia. There, he joined St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church and held prayer meetings for African Americans.
In 1787, frustrated by the church’s restrictions on its black congregants, Allen withdrew and in 1794 established Mother Bethel AME Church, an independent congregation for African Americans. In 1816 his congregation was officially organized as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. With Absalom Jones, the founder of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Allen established the Free African Society, the first mutual-aid society to help newly freed blacks. Later, he and his wife, Sarah, hid runaway slaves in the basement of the Bethel Church as part of the Underground Railroad. Allen also led the Free Produce Society, whose members boycotted products created by slave labor.
