The Free African Society included many people newly freed from slavery after the American Revolutionary War.

In 1792, while at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church,[6][7] Absalom Jones and other African American members were told that they could not join the rest of the congregation in seating and kneeling on the first floor and instead had to be segregated first sitting against the wall and then in the gallery or balcony.

[9] As 1791 began, Jones started holding religious services at FAS, which became the core of his African Church in Philadelphia the following year.

Jones wanted to establish an African-American congregation independent of Caucasian control while remaining part of the Episcopal Church.

Caucasian observers failed to recognize his oratory skills, perhaps because they believed rhetoric to be beyond the capabilities of people of African descent.

[10] In 1775, the state of North Carolina had made it illegal to free enslaved people unless approved by a county court, a provision largely ignored by members of the Society of Friends (Quakers).

After becoming the first Black and freedman to be ordained as a priest, and as the Constitution's deadline for abolition of the slave trade passed, Jones took part in the first group of African Americans to petition the U.S. Congress.

Their petition related to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which they criticized for encouraging cruelty and brutality, as well as supporting the continuing criminal practice of kidnapping free Blacks and selling them into slavery.

Jones drafted a petition on behalf of four formerly enslaved people and asked Congress to adopt "some remedy for an evil of such magnitude.

Jones used moral suasion: trying to convince whites that slavery was immoral, offensive to God, and contrary to the nation's ideal.

In 1816, Allen gathered other Black congregations in the region to create a new and fully independent denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Yellow fever repeatedly struck Philadelphia and other coastal cities in the 1790s, until sanitary improvements advocated by Dr. Benjamin Rush were adopted and completed.

Many Caucasians (including most doctors except for Rush and his assistants, some of whom died) fled the city, hoping to escape infection.

Philadelphia Mayor Matthew Clarkson, who had called upon them for help, publicly recognized that Jones and Allen acted upon their desires to improve the entire community.

In 1991, his remains were exhumed, cremated and placed in a reliquary in the Absalom Jones altar of the current African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas (now located at 6361 Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia).

[17] The national Episcopal Church remembers his life and service annually with a Lesser Feast on the anniversary of his death, February 13.