Richard Allen

Who was Richard Allen?

Richard Allen was a minister, educator, and writer, and the founder in 1816 of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was elected the first bishop of the AME Church in 1816.

Born into slavery, Allen as a young man worked to buy his freedom from his master in Delaware. He went to Philadelphia in 1786, licensed as a Methodist preacher. He belonged for a time to St. George's Methodist Church, but he and his supporters resented its segregation and decided to leave the church. In 1787 he and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society, a non-denominational, mutual aid society for blacks in Philadelphia, which particularly helped widows and children. Eventually they each founded independent black congregations in 1794.