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n November 1787, white elders of Philadelphia's
St. George's Methodist Churched ordered black Methodists to sit in a newly
built gallery. Several free blacks refused, including Richard Allen
(1760-1831), a former slave, who had supported himself as a brickyard laborer,
shoemaker, wagon driver, and wood chopper.
Shaken by this experience, Allen founded the Free
African Society of Philadelphia, which is usually considered the first
autonomous black organization in the United States. Seven years later, in 1794,
Allen founded a separate black Methodist church. That same year, Absalom Jones
(1746-1818), also a former slave and a former Methodist preacher, formed the
African Church of Philadelphia as a racially separate non-denominational
church.
Discriminatory treatment in white-controlled
churches led free black communities across the North to establish separate
black congregations. Between 1804 and 1815, separate black Baptist, Methodist,
and Presbyterian churches were founded in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Wilmington, Del. In 1816, Richard Allen
formed the first autonomous black denomination, the African Methodist Epsicopal
church. Five years later, a separate denomination, the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion church, was established in New York.
By 1820, there may have been 700 African American
congregations. Black churches served as centers of political life, communal
self-help, and social reform, and black ministers were community leaders.
African American ministers played a crucial role
in shaping a distinctive, vernacular American preaching style. During the 1790s, a black evangelist named
Harry Hoosier drew thousands of converts across the South with his dramatic
retellings of Biblical stories. A black Virginia Baptist preacher named John
Jasper became legendary for his ability to string "together picture after
picture." Black preachers' use of repetition, humor, striking metaphors,
and a stress on the human Jesus transformed American preaching styles.