Summary: The biography of Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and one of the early Black leaders in the US.
Many people may be slightly aware of Richard Allen, but not much about him. At least that describes me and why I decided to pick up Freedom’s Prophet. This quote from the introduction sets the stage for why Richard Allen is important.
“Allen did not live through these immense changes passively, a black man adrift in a sea of impersonal and malevolent forces. Rather, he shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the events swirling around him. As the most prominent black preacher of his era, he helped inaugurate a moral critique of slavery and slaveholding that shaped abolitionism for years to come. As one of the first black pamphleteers, he pushed not only for slavery’s demise but also for black equality. As a black institution builder, he spurred the creation of autonomous organizations and churches that nurtured African American struggles for justice throughout the nineteenth century. As a sometime doubter of American racial equality, he participated in black emigration to Haiti. As a leader of the first national black convention, he defined continent-wide protest tactics and strategies for a new generation of activists. Bishop Allen’s lifelong struggle for racial justice makes for a compelling and illuminating story—a tale about a black founder and African Americans in the early American republic.” (p5)
Richard Allen was born into slavery in 1760 and lived until the age of 71 in 1831. Like many who were enslaved, his family was split apart and sold as a child. He became a Christian through the work of early Methodists, who welcomed Black participation in the church. At 17, he joined the church and started to evangelize and preach. Through his preaching and evangelism and the preaching of a white abolitionist preacher, his owners became convinced of the evil of slavery. But his owners did not simply free him and others who were enslaved; he allowed them to buy their freedom. Richard Allen bought his freedom for the equivalent of about five years’ wages for an average laborer by age 20. When he was 24, he was officially ordained and spent two years as a circuit-riding preacher before becoming one of the ministers at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church.