African Methodist Episcopal Church

Richard Allen (1760–1831), the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, was born a slave in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1760. The slaveholder Benjamin Chew sold Allen, his parents, and his three siblings to Stokley Sturgis of Kent County, Delaware, around 1768. Methodist Church circuit riders frequently preached in the area, and Allen responded to their evangelism—perhaps also to their antislavery reputation—and joined the Wesleyan movement. His piety deepened because Sturgis permitted him to attend Methodist services regularly and to hold religious gatherings in the slave owner's own home. Sturgis also allowed Allen and his brother to buy their freedom, a task that was accomplished in 1783. For three years, Allen traveled through the Middle Atlantic states as an itinerant Methodist preacher, finally settling in Philadelphia to preach to blacks at the St. George Methodist Episcopal Church.

The founding of the Free African Society of Philadelphia in 1787, and a racial altercation, caused him to leave St. George, which in turn led to the building of Philadelphia's Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (often known as the Mother Bethel Church) in 1794. In 1807, efforts by several pastors at St. George to control the congregation moved Allen to gain judicial recognition of Bethel's independence. A final attempt in 1815 by a St. George pastor to assert authority at Bethel Church induced Daniel Coker (1780–1846), the leader of Baltimore's black Methodists, to preach a sermon the following year commending Allen for his successful stand. Not long after, Allen drew Coker and other blacks from Baltimore, Salem, New Jersey, and Attleborough, Pennsylvania, to meet with his Philadelphia followers to form the AME Church.

At the AME's 1816 conference in Philadelphia, Coker was elected bishop, but he declined the offer, perhaps because of his light skin color. Allen was then chosen bishop, and under his leadership the denomination rapidly expanded. African Methodism spread north to New York and New England; south through Maryland, the District of Columbia, and (for a time) South Carolina; and west to the Ohio Valley and the old Northwest Territory. During the antebellum period, the denomination included congregations in the slave states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Louisiana. Missionaries such as William Paul Quinn (1788–1873), an AME bishop after 1844, founded scores of congregations in the Midwest in the 1830s and 1840s. Along the Pacific Coast, the AME church spread from Sacramento and San Francisco in the early 1850s to other locations in California and adjoining territories. AME loyalists also had success in Canada and made some inroads into Haiti. In 1864, thirty-three years after Allen's death, the AME Church had a membership of 50,000 in 1,600 congregations.

During the antebellum period, while the AME Church was largely restricted to the northern states, numerous clergy and congregations gave direct aid to the abolition movement. Morris Brown, who became the second bishop of the church after Allen's death, had been implicated in Denmark Vesey's abortive slave insurrection in South Carolina in 1822. Vesey himself was an AME preacher who, according to white authorities, planned the slave revolt during AME church services. The abolitionist stances of Allen, Quinn, and Brown were reaffirmed at the 1840 Pittsburgh Annual Conference. Stating that "slavery pollutes the character of the church of God, and makes the Bible a sealed book to thousands of immortal beings," the delegates resolved that their denomination should use its "influence and energies" to destroy black bondage.

Daniel A. Payne (1811–1893), who became a bishop in 1852, greatly influenced the development of the AME church. Freeborn in Charleston, South Carolina, Payne was a schoolteacher in his early adult years, until a South Carolina state law forbade the education of blacks and forced him to close his school. In 1835 he moved north and matriculated at Gettysburg Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. After his ordination into the AME ministry in 1843, Payne pastored in Baltimore and crusaded for an educated clergy. He later served the denomination as historiographer. In 1863 Payne convinced reluctant AME leaders to commit to a daring venture in higher education by founding Wilberforce University, the first black college started by African Americans. Wilberforce was only the first of several colleges founded by the AME. Others include Allen University (1880) in South Carolina, Morris Brown College (1881) in Georgia, Paul Quinn College (1881) in Texas, and Kittrell College (1886) in North Carolina.

The period of the Civil War and Reconstruction proved pivotal to AME Church development. Recruitment of black soldiers occurred on the premises of AME congregations

such as Israel Church in Washington, D.C. Four AME ministers—Henry M. Turner, William H. Hunter, David Stevens, and Garland H. White—served with ten other black chaplains in the Union Army. Additional AME clergy, including some who would become bishops, also fought on the Union side.

As northern victories liberated Confederate strongholds in Virginia and North Carolina, the Baltimore Annual Conference dispatched AME preachers in 1864 to those states to attract blacks into African Methodism. In 1865, Bishop Daniel A. Payne sailed from New York City to his hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, to establish the AME mission in the South. The rapid acquisition of members and congregations from Virginia to Texas swelled the denomination in 1880 to 387,566 persons in 2,051 churches.

The development of the AME Church in Alabama is illustrative of the denomination's expansion in the postbellum South. Mobile had the first AME congregation as early as 1820, though it was short-lived. The denomination revived when two AME ministers preached in the state in 1864. Formal organization of an Alabama Annual Conference occurred in Selma in 1868, a year after missionaries arrived from Georgia; it started with 6 churches, 31 missions, and 5,617 members. Preachers such as Winfield Henri Mixon played a large role in spearheading AME Church growth. Born a slave near Selma in 1859, Mixon began a long career in 1882 as a pastor and presiding elder, serving until his death in 1932. As a presiding elder, he reported that between 1892 and 1895 he launched fourteen new congregations. When he started his ministry, the state comprised three annual conferences: the Alabama, the Central Alabama, and the North Alabama. As a result of his efforts and those of other church founders, Mixon mapped out three additional jurisdictions, including the East, South, and West Alabama annual conferences. In 1890 there were 247 AME congregations in the state, with 30,781 total members. Mixon helped to increase these numbers to 525 congregations and 42,658 members in 1916.

These evangelistic efforts paralleled the unprecedented political involvement of the AME clergy in Reconstruction state governments and in the U.S. Congress. Approximately fifty-three AME ministers served as officeholders in the legislatures of South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and other states. Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), a Republican, was elected to the Georgia state legislature in 1868, only to be ousted that same year by triumphant Democrats. Richard H. Cain (1825–1887), then pastor of Emmanuel Church in Charleston, served in the South Carolina state senate from 1868 through 1870, and then in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1873 through 1875. Turner and Cain became AME bishops in 1880.

Bishop Payne was unhappy about the ascent of Turner and Cain to the AME episcopacy. He and other northern-based bishops were wary of the new generation of denominational leaders whose followers came from the South. Many of these new leaders, among them Turner and Cain, had experiences in elective offices that Payne believed caused an unfortunate politicization of denominational affairs. In the late nineteenth century, regional backgrounds of ministers determined regional alliances and formed the bases of power within the AME Church.

There was also increasing political involvement of AME clergy in the northern branch of the denomination. Ezekiel Gillespie, a lay founder of the St. Mark Church in Milwaukee, for example, initiated a state supreme court case that won suffrage for Wisconsin blacks in 1866. Benjamin W. Arnett, who became a bishop in 1888, won an

election in 1886 to the Ohio legislature, where he became a friend of the future president William McKinley. He successfully pushed a repeal of Ohio's discriminatory Black Laws.

In the late nineteenth century, the denomination expanded outside of the United States. In 1884 the British Methodist Episcopal (BME) Church, in existence since 1856, united with the AME Church. Thereafter, BME congregations throughout Canada, Bermuda, and South America were part of the AME fold. In 1891, Bishop Turner, who was an influential African emigrationist, established annual conferences in West Africa, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Five years later, Turner formally received the Ethiopian Church of South Africa into the denomination. This church was established in 1892, when dissident Africans led by M. M. Mokone withdrew from the white-dominated Wesleyan Methodist Church after experiencing the same kind of racial discrimination that had brought the AME Church into existence in the United States. Turner invited an Ethiopian delegation to the United States, where they accepted membership. (In 1900, Bishop Levi J. Coppin became the first resident bishop in South Africa.)

Bishop Turner's missionary interests were not confined to Africa. Between 1896 and 1908 he presided as bishop of Georgia, and he mobilized support and manpower from this jurisdiction for expansion into Cuba and Mexico. He commissioned presiding elders from Georgia to establish congregations among black Latinos in both countries, and several successful AME missions were instituted.

Whenever AME advocates for overseas expansion combined this perspective with black nationalism, ideological fissures surfaced in denominational affairs. Turner's espousal of emigration drew vehement opposition from Benjamin T. Tanner (1835–1923). Tanner—who in 1868 became editor of the Christian Recorder, a weekly founded in 1852—started the AME Church Review in 1884, and he edited it until his election to the episcopacy in 1888. Concerning Turner's back-to-Africa efforts, Tanner asserted that those who wished to escape the fight for racial equality in the United States counseled "cowardice." He felt that blacks should remain in the United States to secure their full constitutional privileges. However, while Tanner opposed black emigration to Africa, he and other AME leaders did not fully disagree with all of Turner's nationalist views. Tanner, for example, authored Is the Negro Cursed? (1869) and The Color of Solomon, What? (1895), both of which challenged racist interpretations of scripture and argued that persons of color figured prominently in Biblical history. In 1893, Benjamin Arnett, who served as bishop with Turner and Tanner, told the World's Parliament of Religions (in his speech "Christianity and the Negro") that St. Luke was black and so were other important figures in the early church.

Between 1890 and 1916 the AME Church grew from 494,777 members in 2,481 congregations to 548,355 members in 6,636 congregations. In 1926 the denomination included 545,814 members in 6,708 congregations. There was significant numerical strength in Georgia, where 74,149 members worshipped in 1,173 congregations. Florida had 45,541 members in 694 churches. There was some decline in AME strength by 1936, however, when the church reported 4,578 congregations and 493,357 members.

While the AME Church in the South was growing, so was the church in the industrial North. The massive black migration from southern rural communities to industrial centers in the North, South, and West during the two World Wars caused major growth in AME churches in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Los Angeles, and other major cities. In these settings, clergy fashioned a version of the Social Gospel that required their involvement with numerous issues in housing, social welfare, unionization, and politics. In the 1920s the Reverend Harrison G. Payne, pastor of Park Place Church in Homestead, a mill town near Pittsburgh, initiated an effort to supply housing to blacks newly arrived from the South; during World War II, investigators with the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee found cooperative AME pastors in numerous cities. Many AME pastors worked with labor unions. Dwight V. Kyle of the Avery Chapel Church in Memphis, Tennessee, for example, sided with the efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to unionize black and white mass-production workers in a dangerous antiunion setting.

The burgeoning civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s found substantive support within the AME clergy. J. A. Delaine, a pastor and school principal in Clarendon County, South Carolina, and Oliver Brown, the pastor of St. Mark Church in Topeka, Kansas, filed suits against public school segregation. Their efforts culminated in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the "separate but equal" doctrine. Threats against Delaine pushed him out of South Carolina to New York City. Activist AME clergy moved the denomination at the 1960 general conference to establish a social action department; Frederick C. James, a South Carolina pastor and future bishop, became its first director.

When Bishop Richard Allen authorized Jarena Lee in 1819 to function as an exhorter in the AME Church, he opened the door to women in the ministry. For nearly 150 years, unordained female evangelists played important roles as preachers, pastors, and founders of congregations. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amanda Berry Smith, Sarah Hughes, and Lucy Thurman preached in AME pulpits. Smith, for example, evangelized widely in the United States and then preached abroad in the British Isles, India, and West Africa. Like many, Millie Wolfe, a woman preacher in Waycross, Georgia, focused her efforts on the denomination's Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society. She published a book of sermons that included "Scriptural Authority for Women's Work in the Christian Church." Female evangelists in the Rocky Mountain states in the early 1900s became crucial to AME Church expansion in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, and Montana. They established congregations and frequently supplied pulpits throughout this large region. While the gifted preaching of Martha Jayne Keys, Mary Watson Stewart, and others sustained the visibility of female ministers in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until 1960 that the denomination allowed the full ordination of women. (An earlier attempt by Henry M. Turner to ordain women in 1885 had been promptly overturned by a church conference.)

Ecumenical efforts among African-American Christians also drew upon AME church leadership. In 1933, Bishop Reverdy C. Ransom (1861–1959) called together black denominational leaders to establish the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches. Similarly, in 1978 Bishop John Hurst Adams spearheaded the founding of the Congress of National Black Churches. Subsequently, Bishop Philip R. Cousin became president of the National Council of Churches in 1983, while Bishop Vinton R. Anderson became president of the World Council of Churches in 1991.

The Black Theology movement, which lasted from the late 1960s into the 1980s, drew AME participation through AME-trained theologians Cecil W. Cone (author of The Identity Crisis in Black Theology [1975]) and James H. Cone (author of Black Theology and Black Power

[1969]). Jacqueline Grant, another theologian out of the AME tradition, pioneered the development of feminist theology. Her ideas were explored in White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus (1989).

Throughout its history, the AME Church has embraced congregations that crossed lines of class, culture, and geography. Several elements of Wesleyan worship remain in AME services, regardless of location and demography. A standard order of worship, mainly consisting of hymn singing, remains a staple of AME worship. Baptismal practices and the communion service make the AME Church virtually indistinguishable from white Methodist congregations. However, other practices rooted in African-American tradition—such as extemporaneous praying, singing of spirituals and gospels, and shouting—were observed depending on the cultural makeup of the congregation.

Since its formal founding in 1816, the AME Church's quadrennial General Conference has remained the supreme authority in denominational governance. Annual conferences, over which active bishops preside, cover particular geographical areas. During these yearly jurisdictional meetings, ministers receive their pastoral appointments. Within the annual conferences, districts have been established; these are superintended by presiding elders. The AME episcopacy, from Richard Allen's election and consecration in 1816 to the present, has been a lifetime position. General officers who administer such programs as publishing, pensions, Christian education, and evangelism serve for four years, but they can stand for re-election. Bishops and general officers are chosen at the general conference by elected ministerial and lay delegates. By 1993 the denomination had grown to 2,000,000 members in 7,000 congregations in the United States and thirty other countries in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The AME Church has no central headquarters, although its publishing house is located in Nashville, Tennessee. At the turn of the twenty-first century, twenty-one active bishops and nine general officers made up the AME Church leadership. In 2005, the AME Church listed 2,500,000 adherents in the United States and 300,000 in other countries.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; African Union Methodism; Allen, Richard; Black Codes; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ; Cain, Richard Harvey; Congress of National Black Churches, Inc.; Payne, Daniel Alexander; Social Gospel; Turner, Henry McNeal

Bibliography

Dickerson, Dennis C. A Liberated Past: Explorations in A.M.E. Church History. Nashville, Tenn.: A.M.E. Church Sunday School Union, 2003.

Gregg, Howard D. History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Nashville, Tenn.: AME Church, 1980.

Payne, Daniel A. History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Nashville, Tenn.: AME Church Sunday School Union, 1891. Reprint, 1998.

Walker, Clarence E. Rock in a Weary Land: The African Methodist Episcopal Church during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Wright, Richard R., Jr. The Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Nashville, Tenn.: AME Church Sunday School Union, 1963.

dennis c. dickerson (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005