Founded in 1816, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church became one of the leading social, cultural, and religious institutions in African-American life.
The AME Church grew out of tensions within the biracial Methodist Church following the American Revolution. Methodist churches opposed slavery and encouraged the participation of free African Americans in the church, both as congregants and as preachers. At the same time, the white leaders of the Methodist movement believed that African-American styles of worship threatened the church’s practices. Increasingly, they advocated the subordination and segregation of African-American congregants.
Over time, naturally, tension between black and white Methodists grew. During the early 1800s, antislavery attitudes in the Methodist organization weakened, as did the willingness of the Methodist leadership to ordain African Americans as ministers or include them in denominational decision making.
In response, a number of African Methodist congregations meeting in Philadelphia in April 1816 organized the African Methodist Episcopal Church, naming Richard Allen its first bishop. Spreading swiftly throughout the North and West before the Civil War, the church also established a strong presence in the South despite prohibitions against its presence.
Before the Civil War, the AME Church emphasized education, abolition, and community self-help. AME churches, including Philadelphia’s “Mother Bethel,” served as havens for men and women escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. Churches offered classes for congregants, stressing literacy, mathematics, and familiarity with the Bible. Church members also founded Ohio’s Wilberforce University in 1856, the first college for African Americans in the United States.
By the mid-19th century the AME Church had become one of the most prolific publishers of African-American writing. The church’s earliest works included hymnals and other religious literature. In 1841 the church began publishing the AME Church Magazine (later the Christian Recorder), one of the first African-American newspapers published in North America. Between 1858 and 1864, the church published African-American essays, poetry, and short stories in its Repository of Religion and Literature, an effort it revived in 1884 with the A. M.E. Church Review.
Politically, the AME was a strong advocate of emancipation during the Civil War and voting rights for African Americans after the war. As segregation and discrimination hardened in the years after Reconstruction, AME churches remained centers of African-American cultural and spiritual life, sustaining black communities into the 20th century.
Further reading: Clarence Earl Walker, A Rock in a Weary Land: The African Methodist Episcopal Church during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
—Tom Laichas
World History
