Allen, Richard

By: Scott A. Miltenberger

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Allen, Richard

Sex:  Male

Born:  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
14 February 1760

Died:  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
26 March 1831

Activity/Profession:  Slave, African Methodist Episcopal Bishop

(b. 14 February 1760; d. 26 March 1831),
African American religious leader, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and abolitionist.

Richard Allen was born a slave into Philadelphia's noted Chew family, whose patriarch Benjamin Chew was a prominent lawyer and served as Pennsylvania's chief justice from 1774 to 1777. In 1767 the family sold Richard to Stokeley Sturgis, a farmer in Kent County, Delaware. There Richard met a Methodist circuit rider, an encounter that transformed his life.

Richard Allen, shown in a lithograph by Peter S. Duval c. 1840, from a portrait by an unknown artist. Allen was not only a religious leader but also a prominent secular leader and social activist in the northern free black community.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, N.Y.

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Unlike all other Protestant groups at the time, the Methodists made no distinctions based on color; moreover, they opposed slavery. Sometime around 1780, after attending a revival held by an itinerant Methodist preacher, Richard had a profound religious conversion. He began to attend Methodist prayer meetings, learned to read and write, and eventually presided over the local meetings. Soon after, inspired by a sermon given at his home by the charismatic Methodist preacher Freeborn Garrettson, Sturgis became convinced that slaveholding was wrong. He drafted a gradual manumission contract with Richard that permitted him to work for hire at farms and towns in the county. By 1786 Richard had purchased his freedom, having in the end earned most of the money by working for American forces during the Revolutionary War.

Taking the surname “Allen” to signify his new free status, Richard began to travel the Methodist circuit along the Eastern Seaboard from South Carolina to New York, preaching to blacks as well as whites. To support himself on his travels, he worked as a sawyer and wagon driver. In 1787 a Methodist elder of Philadelphia's Saint George's Methodist Church heard Allen preaching in a nearby town and asked him to preach to Saint George's black congregants. Although he was required to hold his services at 5:00 A.M. so as not to interfere with those of the whites, Allen agreed.

For the next five to six years, along with his fellow black preacher Absalom Jones, Allen ministered to the free black community at Saint George's and throughout Philadelphia. Together they founded the Free African Society, a nondenominational black mutual aid society, in 1787. Allen and Jones also nursed the idea of a separate Methodist church for black Philadelphians. Although Allen ultimately broke with the Free African Society over religious questions, he maintained his desire for a separate black Methodist church. That desire only increased as racial hostility mounted at Saint George's.

One Sunday morning in either 1792 or 1793, depending on accounts, white trustees at the church ordered black parishioners to the back of the church. At that moment Allen and Jones led black congregants in a dramatic walkout. Their group consequently organized into a semiautonomous black Protestant congregation. When the issue of denominational affiliation arose, Allen and Jones insisted that the group retain its connection with Methodism. Others—including the prominent black businessman and social leader James Forten—disagreed and decided to affiliate with the Episcopal Church. They formed the new Saint Thomas African Episcopal Church and offered Allen the pastorate. When he refused, they persuaded Jones to become their minister. Despite their differences, Allen, Jones, and Forten remained friends and committed fellow activists throughout their lives.

Undaunted in his quest for an independent black Methodist church, Allen and eleven like-minded Methodists purchased an old blacksmith shop in 1794, moved it to the corner of Sixth and Lombard streets in Philadelphia, and established Bethel Church, also known as Mother Bethel. The church installed Allen as preacher. In 1799 he became a deacon and, later, a church elder. In 1816 he led Bethel, along with five other black Methodist congregations in the North, in the establishment of a truly independent black Christian church, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. That same year, Jones and other ministers ordained Allen as the first presiding bishop of the AME Church. Over the next fifteen years the church flourished in the North, attracting thousands of free blacks disillusioned with the racism of white Protestant churches.

Allen's conviction that Methodism was the denomination best suited to the spiritual needs of blacks in the United States animated his single-minded pursuit of a separate black Methodist church. Although disappointed that Methodism eventually retreated from its earlier message of racial egalitarianism, he found in Methodism's purest and plainest form a means for spiritual healing and social uplift for blacks. Allen believed that Methodism's extemporaneous, heartfelt style of preaching could better reach African Americans than the more lofty, erudite, composed sermons of other Protestant faiths. He also valued Methodism's emphasis on personal discipline, which he felt provided the tools for individual uplift. In this, the community played a central role: Methodist communities furnished the crucial values—simplicity, honesty, modesty, and sobriety—by which all members were judged. Individuals were likewise expected to sustain and support the community of which they were a part. Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church reflected this understanding of Methodism, and this understanding guided all of his other activities.

Besides being an important African American religious leader, Allen was a prominent secular leader and social activist in the northern free black community. In Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century he helped found the Bethel Benevolent Society, a moral-reform organization, and the African Society for the Education of Youth, a black day school. In 1793 Allen and Jones responded to the noted physician Benjamin Rush's call to mobilize the black community to serve during Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic. Allen, Jones, and other members of the Free African Society cared for hundreds of victims, regardless of race. When reports circulated that blacks had profited from the epidemic, the two ministers published A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 and a Refutation of Some Censures Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications, defending the black community and documenting their heroic efforts. Jones and Allen also founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality in 1809, and during the War of 1812 the two ministers, together with Forten, mobilized over two thousand free black men in defense of the city.

Allen's activism centered most on the abolition of slavery and the establishment of racial equality in the United States. In 1794 he published An Address to Those Who Keep Slaves and Approve the Practice, which attacked the institution of slavery. From 1797 to his death in 1831, Allen operated a station on the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves at Bethel Church. Beginning in 1799 he and Jones gathered the signatures of hundreds of blacks and petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish slavery. A year later they petitioned Congress. Allen also supported local antislavery societies in the North and contributed money and articles to the Presbyterian minister Samuel Cornish's antislavery paper, Freedom's Journal.

Allen vociferously opposed the American Colonization Society (ACS). Initially, he and other black leaders, such as Jones, Forten, and the black Presbyterian minister John Gloucester, had supported the migration of blacks to Canada as well as the black sea captain Paul Cuffe's plans for a black colony in Africa. After hosting a mass meeting on the issue in Philadelphia at Bethel Church in 1816, the activists were convinced by members of their community that colonization, and specifically the efforts of the ACS, represented an attempt to maintain existing social inequality between blacks and whites in the United States. A year later Allen, Jones, Forten, and Gloucester held another meeting at Bethel, protesting the deportation policies of the ACS.

Allen also joined Forten in organizing the national black convention of 1830 that established the American Society of Free Persons of Color. In the society's founding address, An Address to the Free People of Color of These United States, Allen called “for the speedy elevation of ourselves and brethren to the scale and standing of men.” He endorsed a comprehensive program of racial equality, self-help, and agricultural and mechanical education that anticipated the ideas of Booker T. Washington in the twentieth century.

Allen's historical legacy can scarcely be overestimated. Upon his death, the black abolitionist David Walker proclaimed him one of “the greatest divines who has lived since the apostolic age.” Indeed, like the apostles of the New Testament, Allen not only built churches, communities, and societies but also fashioned a distinctive social message. By the early twenty-first century, his AME Church claimed some eight thousand congregations and 3.5 million members throughout the world. It also supported a number of historically black colleges, such as Allen University in South Carolina and Wilberforce University in Ohio. Bethel AME, rebuilt in 1859, still stands on its original site in Philadelphia. Allen is interred in the basement, and the church holds a museum honoring his life and accomplishments. Allen's commitment to racial equality, though, is his greatest contribution. Blending religious devotion with a passion for social justice, he paved the way for future activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., who came closer to realizing his vision of a racially united United States.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; American Colonization Society; Forten, James; Fraternal Organizations and Mutual Aid Societies; Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Society; Freedom's Journal; Gloucester, John; Jones, Absalom; Methodist Church and African Americans; Petitions; Presbyterians and African Americans; Religion; Temperance; Walker, David; and War of 1812.

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