Freedom’s Prophet

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)

“As his antislavery sermonizing and pamphleteering efforts illustrate, Allen adhered to the principles of nonviolent protest throughout his life. Even in an age of great slave revolts, from Gabriel's Rebellion in Virginia to the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean, Allen's ideology was perhaps the norm. Most slaves in the Atlantic world did not, and could not, successfully rebel; most enslaved people had to endure. But what did that actually mean? For Allen and black founders, it meant turning nonviolent protest—enduring over the long haul—into a moral and political weapon.” (p10)

“At the heart of Allen's moral vision was an evangelical religion—Methodism—that promised equality to all believers in Christ. Indeed, one of Allen's best claims to equal founding status was his attempt to merge faith and racial politics in the young republic. His constant sermonizing on slavery's evil was (in theory) perfectly pitched to men and women who viewed faith as a key part of the American character.” (p23)

“A former slave now in the capital of free black life, Richard Allen publicly challenged Franklin's line of thinking. The problem, he commented in 1794, lay not in blacks' essentially subversive nature but in white society's consistent failure to nurture African American equality. Allen condemned not only slavery but also the racialist beliefs underpinning slavery and black inequality. He then proposed his own solutions in very Franklinesque language. Whites, Allen suggested, might try the “experiment” of treating black people as they would members of their own family. Next, he wrote in an almost direct reply to Franklin's fears of black equality, white citizens must believe in their own Christian and republican language. It was a message he returned to again and again: liberate blacks, teach them scripture and principles of good citizenship, and watch them become pious and respectable members of the American republic.” (p25)

“As Richard Allen later put it in a famous letter to Freedom's Journal, America was a black homeland precisely because of slaves' and free black laborers' incessant toil for the country's prosperity and independence. “This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood,” Allen proclaimed, “is now our mother country.” African Americans deserved the full fruits of citizenship.” (p150)

“Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Allen's and black founders' activism, then, was their increasing cynicism about achieving racial justice in America. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, Allen grew so doubtful that he flirted with various Atlantic-world emigration plans. No fleeting consideration for him, Allen meditated on black removal for the last fifteen years of his life. He supported black-led African-colonization schemes before becoming one of the most forceful African American proponents of Haitian emigration. America, he told Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer in 1824, is a land of oppression, whereas the great black republic of Haiti promised “freedom and equality.”43 Allen even headed the Haitian Emigration Society of Philadelphia, helping hundreds of black émigrés set sail for the Caribbean. Still later, he supported emigration to Canada.” (p19)