:Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Abstract

This book is a contextual biography of Richard Allen (1760–1831), minister (ordained in 1799 by Francis Asbury), first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in 1816), and defender of black rights in religion and society. Several substantial documents survive to help us understand Allen's life: a narrative, co-authored with Absalom Jones, of the yellow fever that plagued Philadelphia in 1793; an autobiography dictated shortly before Allen died; and a few addresses and execution-day sermons. There are also personal documents and brief comments on religion and on slavery. As Richard S. Newman notes, the gaps in the record are wide. About two-thirds of this work is a companion to the autobiography and the yellow fever narrative. Newman's strategy here is like Vincent Carretta's in Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005). Both write as detectives (not as skeptics), augmenting the writings of their subjects with further documentation. On the positive side, Newman's book is a model of contextual research that should be read by students, scholars, and lay people interested in Allen. On the negative side, the book, insofar as its intent is usually the confirmation of Allen's texts, rarely shows distance from its subject. Lay people reading this book will probably infer that the purpose of scholarship on early black abolitionists and early black Christians is celebration of their achievements. From a twenty-first-century perspective, some praise seems appropriate, but we should also pass beyond the individuals and assess the positive and negative implications of their ideas and values. Scholars have made such assessments of nineteenth-century abolitionists. We should measure eighteenth-century abolitionists, white as well as black, in the same way.