Rev. Richard Allen

Here at Salt House, February is Black CHURCH History Month and we take time each week to celebrate past and current Black change-makers who have impacted the church, because Black Church History is our history.

Jemar Tisby, in his book The Color of Compromise, describes how the first black Christians in America often met in secrecy for fear of persecution. Enslaved people had to meet in, what was called "hush arbors" which were secret places on farmlands, in the woods or swamps where they gathered for covert worship. After the Civil War black Christians formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Richard Allen was one of the founders. He purchased his freedom in 1786 and began preaching in various interracial Methodist churches, where black worshipers were treated as second class and segregated in seating.

On a Sunday in 1792, Richard Allen and fellow black minister Absalom Jones entered St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia. They knelt to pray in a whites-only section of the church. Allen recounts the episode in his autobiography:

We had not been long upon our knees before I heard considerable scuffling and low talking. I raised my head up and saw one of the trustees having hold of the rev. Absalom Jones, pulling him up off of his knees and saying, "You must get up now you must not kneel here or I will call for aid and force you away." Mr. Jones said, "wait until prayer is over and I will get up and trouble you no more." They pulled us up, and [all the black members of the church] walk out that day as one body."

Using his own money and plot of land, Allen helped start the Bethel African Church in Philadelphia in 1794, and then the African Methodist Episcopal denomination in 1816 and served as the first bishop.

We say 'this is good' for our Black brothers in Christ, Reverend Richard Allen and Reverend Absalom Jones.