Our History

Born into slavery in Philadelphia on February 14, 1760, Richard Allen and his family were sold to a household in Kent County, Delaware. Through a process of gradual manumission he labored six years to purchase his freedom, paying $2,000 in 1786.

After an emotional conversion to the Christian faith, Allen became a Methodist preacher to other Black men and women wherever he was hired to work. Once free, St. George's Methodist Church invited him to preach to its Black members, and under his ministry that membership grew dramatically.

As the congregation swelled, a policy pushed Black worshippers to the walls of the sanctuary and into the balcony. In November 1787, Allen and several others were pulled from their knees in prayer because they knelt in a section reserved for whites. They walked out — in the same city, in the same year the United States Constitution was being ratified.

That stand made Allen a prime mover in the construction and consecration of the Bethel African Church, dedicated in 1799, and in the founding of what became the African Methodist Episcopal Church — America's first independent Black denomination. As a former slave, he wrote and spoke against slavery, sheltering those who escaped it in his own home and in the basement of Bethel Church.

In 1830 he was elected president of the American Society of Free Persons of Color, a convention formed to better the lives of free Black people across the United States and Canada. His rise — from a hired-out slave to bishop, entrepreneur, founder of a denomination, and national leader — ended with his death in 1831, at the age of seventy-one.