Absalom Jones

Absalom Jones was born into slavery on November 7, 1746, in Sussex County, Delaware. As a boy he taught himself to read, drawing on the New Testament, and later attended a Quaker-run night school for people of African descent after his enslaver brought him to Philadelphia. He knew the deep wound of family separation: while he was still young, his mother, sister, and brothers were sold away from him. Through years of labor and saving, he first purchased his wife Mary's freedom, and on October 1, 1784, he himself was manumitted.

A free man at last, Jones became a lay leader among the Black members of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church, working alongside his lifelong friend Richard Allen. In 1787 the two founded the Free African Society, a mutual-aid organization that supported the sick, the widowed, the orphaned, and the poor, and that stood for the emancipation of the enslaved. When Black worshippers were subjected to humiliating segregation at St. George's, Jones and Allen led their people out.

From that departure grew a new congregation. Jones guided the founding of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, which opened its doors in 1794 as the first Black Episcopal church in the United States. He was ordained a deacon in 1795 and, in 1802, was ordained a priest, becoming the first African American ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church.

Jones never ceased laboring for freedom. He gathered petitions to Congress against the Fugitive Slave Act and for the gradual abolition of slavery, and he preached against the slave trade. He died in Philadelphia on February 13, 1818. May his name be spoken with honor: a self-freed man who opened a door no one had walked through before, and held it open for generations to follow.