Philadelphia's Free Black Community: The Largest in America

Richard Allen was born enslaved in Philadelphia in seventeen sixty. His enslaver, Benjamin Chew, sold Allen's family apart when Allen was a child. Allen worked for years to buy his own freedom, and when he was free he walked to a Methodist church in Philadelphia and started preaching. He was good at it. He was told, eventually, that his congregation needed to sit in the gallery, away from white worshippers. He walked out. He took his congregation with him. In seventeen ninety-four, he founded Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on land he owned himself, land that has remained continuously in Black ownership for more than two hundred thirty years. It is the oldest parcel of real estate in the United States owned continuously by African Americans.

Pennsylvania had passed the Gradual Abolition Act in seventeen eighty, the first such law enacted by any American state. The law was gradual in a specific sense: children born to enslaved mothers after March first, seventeen eighty were born free but were legally bound as servants until the age of twenty eight. Adults already enslaved remained enslaved for life. Philadelphia's free Black community grew in spite of these limitations, and by eighteen sixty it was the largest free Black urban community in the United States, approximately twenty-two thousand people.

They built institutions with the urgency of people who understood their community could be dismantled at any moment. The Institute for Colored Youth, founded in eighteen thirty-seven, became one of the best secondary schools in the city. William Still, a Philadelphia-born son of formerly enslaved parents, documented every person he helped to freedom through the eastern Underground Railroad corridor and wrote it down in a book that remains one of the primary records of that history.

The community also endured anti-Black riots in eighteen twenty-nine, eighteen thirty-four, eighteen thirty-five, eighteen thirty-eight, and eighteen forty-two, waves of organized violence that destroyed property and killed people. The community rebuilt each time.

The church Richard Allen built is still standing at Fourth and Richard Allen Avenue. Sunday services are still held.