Free African Society

The Free African Society was the first African American mutual aid organization. The African American religious leaders Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, along with other free black men in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded the organization in 1787 with the assistance of antislavery Quakers. Although its constitution stated that membership was open to “the free Africans and their descendants, of the City of Philadelphia,” the organization, as with the majority of mutual aid societies, was all male, probably following in the tradition of West African single-sex societies.

The Free African Society combined social, political, and religious purposes. The organization met monthly and collected membership dues to provide food, shelter, clothing, and financial assistance for members and their families in times of need. The society established itself as moral guardian of Philadelphia's emerging free black community through the construction of marriage registers and the use of visiting committees, which inspected black households and encouraged black families to conform to Protestant moral precepts, such as marriage, temperance, church attendance, and the education of children. The society was also a locus of political activism. Members organized protests against the international slave trade and the continuation of southern slavery.

The Free African Society's most important impact was its role in fostering religion among free blacks, which ultimately led to the establishment of the first independent black churches in the United States. In 1789 the society adapted the Quaker practice of silent worship by beginning meetings with fifteen minutes of silence. In 1790 the society petitioned the city of Philadelphia for the right to lease a section of Potter's Field to provide blacks a burial place, an important element of black religious belief in Africa and the Americas. In 1791 the society began holding formal ecumenical religious services that allowed guest preachers from various denominations to conduct services. That same year Absalom Jones led the group, with the assistance of the white antislavery activist Benjamin Rush, to begin collecting money to establish the African Church of Philadelphia.

Although white members and leaders of traditional Protestant denominations disapproved of the project and discouraged other whites from contributing funds, blacks' own commitment to the project allowed the Free African Society to buy two plots of land. Such commitment increased in 1792, when the white elders of the newly renovated Saint George's Methodist Episcopal Church attempted to physically remove black worshippers, including Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, to the segregated gallery. Instead, blacks left the church as a group, never to return. Later that same year the Welsh immigrant John Nicholson offered the Free African Society a loan to begin construction of the church. In 1794 the church opened as the African Episcopal Church of Saint Thomas, under the leadership of Absalom Jones. Richard Allen, a committed Methodist despite the 1792 incident at Saint George's, withdrew from the congregation and founded a Methodist congregation that, by 1817, would become the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Bibliography

Horton, James Oliver, and Lois Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Nash, Gary. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

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