Existing comment:
African American Church Founders, 1787
Pulled from their knees during prayer in 1787, African Americans left their Philadelphia church, St. George's Methodist Episcopal, formed the Free African Society, and began the formation of churches of their own, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church under Richard Allen and the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas under Absalom Jones. Both leaders became civil rights advocates as well as ministers. African American preachers and churches would often be in the vanguard of the quest for civil rights from this period through the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. |