The founding of the independent Black church
Pushed out of white-run churches, Richard Allen and other Black Methodists found Bethel Church in Philadelphia and, in 1816, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
- The Black Church in the African American Experience — C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, Duke University Press (1990)
- Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South — Albert J. Raboteau, Oxford University Press (1978)
- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada — Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans (1992)
According to Allen’s own account, he and other Black worshippers walked out of Philadelphia’s St George’s Methodist Church after being pulled from their knees in prayer and told to sit in a segregated gallery; the date is debated. Allen, a formerly enslaved preacher, opened Bethel Church in 1794 and in 1816 led the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the US. Black Baptist churches arose at the same time. Alongside the “invisible institution” of secret worship among the enslaved, with its spirituals and its story of Exodus, these churches became the one institution Black Americans fully controlled.
- The Black Church in the African American Experience — C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, Duke University Press (1990)
- Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South — Albert J. Raboteau, Oxford University Press (1978)
Why it matters today
Historically Black churches, AME, Baptist, Church of God in Christ and others, remain the heart of many Black American communities, places of worship, music, leadership and political organising. The murder of nine worshippers at Charleston's Emanuel AME Church in 2015 showed that they are still targets.