ALLEN, RICHARD

(1760-1831), African-American religious leader and reformer. As a shaper of thought and builder of institutions, few of his white contemporaries matched the accomplishments of Allen in the postrevolutionary period. At age twenty, only a few months after purchasing his release from slavery, he was preaching to mostly white audiences and converting many to Methodism. At twenty-seven, he was one of the founders of the Free African Society of Philadelphia, probably the first autonomous organization of free blacks in the United States. Before he was thirty-five, he had become the spiritual leader of what grew into Philadelphia's largest black congregation—Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Over a long lifetime, he founded or served as officer in many other organizations designed to improve the lives of African-Americans. Although he had no formal education, he became an accomplished writer of sermons, tracts, addresses, and remonstrances.

Born a slave in the family of a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and officeholder, Benjamin Chew, Allen was sold with his family to a farmer near Dover, Delaware, in about 1768. It was here, in 1777, that Allen experienced a religious awakening through the preaching of itinerant Methodists shortly after most of his family had been sold again. Three years later he contracted to purchase his freedom.

Supporting himself as a woodchopper, brickyard laborer, wagon driver, and shoemaker, Allen, by 1783, had fixed the course of his life through his frequent itinerant preaching. In 1786, the Methodists in Philadelphia called him to preach to black members of their flock.

In Philadelphia, Allen founded Mother Bethel, a black Methodist church that opened its doors in 1794, and the independent African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church in 1816. Between those years, he established schools for black youth and mutual aid societies to free black Philadelphians from dependence on white charity. He wrote pamphlets and sermons attacking the slave trade and slavery and became a leader in almost every African-American institution in the city.

His twenty-year battle with the white Methodist church, which led to a final separation in 1817, was a vital phase in the African-American struggle in the North to get out from under the controlling hand of white religionists. The A.M.E. church, with Allen as its first bishop, allowed former slaves to forge an Afro-Christianity that spoke in the language and answered the needs of a growing number of northern and, later, southern blacks. For decades, the church helped heal the scars of slavery and facilitated the adjustment of black southern migrants to life in the North.

In his later years, Allen was drawn to the idea of colonization—in Africa, Haiti, and Canada—as an answer to the needs of blacks facing discrimination and exploitation as freed persons. The capstone of his career was leadership at the first meeting of the National Negro Convention Movement, an umbrella organization that launched coordinated reform efforts among black Americans.

Carol V. R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Rise of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (1973).

Gary B. Nash

See also Abolitionist Movement; A.M.E. Church; Black Churches; Free Negroes, 1619-1860.