Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Introduction: A Black Founder’s Many Worlds

Introduction A Black Founder’s Many Worlds If I could write but a part of my labors, it would fill a volume. —Richard Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours If you go to Philadelphia today and stop at the corner of Sixth and Lombard streets, you stand on hallowed ground. Here one of early America’s leading reformers built an internationally famous church, wrote pamphlets of protest that served as models for generations to come, and championed liberty and justice for all. “He was one of the most talented people of his generation,” a distinguished scholar of the American Revolution has written; he was a true “Apostle of Freedom ,” an early biographer declared. His name was Richard Allen. He was a black founder.1 For those who visit “Mother Bethel,” as his South Philadelphia church is still called, objects big and small commemorate Allen as a black founder. A hand-fan informs its holders that the church “stands on the oldest parcel of ground continuously owned by blacks.” The simple object—made of the thinnest cardboard material but deceptively useful during the sweltering Philadelphia summers—also highlights Allen’s organization of the first black reform society in America (the Free African Society) during the magical year of 1787. Knowing that many modern-day visitors will already have taken in the Liberty Bell and Independence Mall (where white American founders attempted to craft “a more perfect union”), the Mother Bethel fan implies that the formation of the Constitution was but one of the many key events occurring in Philadelphia that year. Black founder Richard Allen led another critical event less than a mile from where Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Adams once stood. 1 In his hometown, as one might suspect, Allen’s legacy remains strong. The Philadelphia phone book lists the number for “Mother Bethel” and then adds that the church sits on land “purchased by Richard Allen” in 1791. Guided tours roll past Mother Bethel on most days, and Sunday services at Allen’s magnificently rebuilt church (refashioned in 1889 in the Romanesque style favored by late-nineteenth-century American architects like Henry Hobson Richardson) find visitors attending from all over the world. “Welcome, Bienvenue, Welcommen,” the church hymnal says. “No institution allows deeper insight to the heart and soul of African Americans than the church,” AME pastor Jeffrey Leath has written, and “Mother Bethel . . . has been a shining star for African Americans for over two hundred years.” (Today, the broader AME Church boasts a global membership of over two million people.) “The courage and compassion of her founder, Bishop Richard Allen,” he continues, “set a tone for succeeding generations.”2 Allen’s contemporaries agreed. “Richard Allen! Oh my God!!” celebrated Boston activist David Walker wrote in 1829. “The bare recollection of the labors of this man fills my soul with all those very high emotions which would take the pen of Addison to portray.” Allen’s admirers constitute a who’s who of African American life: celebrated reformer Frederick Douglass, black physician James McCune Smith, famed female preacher Jarena Lee, the pathbreaking urban sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. “If true greatness consists in self-sacrificing heroism and devotion,” African American preacher John Palmer told a gathering at Allen Chapel in Philadelphia at the close of the nineteenth century, “if again, greatness consists in that manifest patriotism which yearns to strike the blow which results in bringing freedom and liberty to an oppressed people . . . then Richard Allen was great.”3 White reformers celebrated Allen’s founding credentials as well. He was, one commentator wrote of an 1813 engraving of the Rev. Richard Allen, “the first black Bishop in the United States and perhaps the world!”4 During the 1790s, Quaker abolitionist Warner Mifflin roamed the mid-Atlantic countryside touting Allen’s pamphlets of protest, telling whoever would listen that this man—yes, an African American writer!—must be studied. A decade prior to Mifflin’s clarion call, the young and recently freed Richard Allen had so impressed the country’s leading Methodist missionary, Francis Asbury, that the white chaplain asked the prodigy preacher to be his special assistant in saving American souls. And before even this, Allen gained renown around his child2 | Introduction hood home of Dover, Delaware, for using a white preacher to finagle freedom from his second master. Allen always behaved “honestly,” wrote Stokeley Sturgis, Allen’s former master, in 1783...