Richard Allen

Richard Allen was born into slavery on the fourteenth of February 1760, held by Benjamin Chew, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and colonial official who later rose to Attorney General and, in the 1770s, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania. While still a boy, Allen and his family were sold to Stokeley Sturgis, a farmer near Dover, Delaware. There the family was broken apart when financial trouble forced Sturgis to sell Allen's mother and several of his siblings away.

On the Delaware plantation Allen taught himself to read and write, and, drawn to the Methodist Society that welcomed both enslaved and free Black worshippers, he experienced a profound conversion. His preaching so moved Sturgis that his enslaver came to believe slavery was wrong. Allen was permitted to purchase his freedom, and by roughly 1780 he had labored his way out of bondage, taking the surname Allen as a free man.

As an itinerant preacher he came to Philadelphia and worshipped at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church, where he and other Black congregants met with segregation and indignity. In 1787, with Absalom Jones, he helped found the Free African Society, a pioneering mutual-aid body for the Black community. Determined that his people should worship in freedom and dignity, Allen founded Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1816 the independent congregations united as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first fully independent Black denomination in the United States, and Allen was consecrated its first bishop. He led it as a sanctuary of faith, education, and abolitionist conviction until his death on the twenty-sixth of March 1831. He rests beneath Mother Bethel in Philadelphia — a shepherd who built for his people a house that could not be taken from them.