John Mifflin Brown (September 8, 1817 – March 16, 1893) was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

He helped open a number of churches and schools, including the Payne Institute which became Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, and Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas.

He lived with Emerson and Henry Chester, a doctor and a lawyer, where he worked for them in exchange for secular and religious lessons.

Shortly later he returned to Philadelphia, but did not remain, instead moving to Poughkeepsie, New York where he attended a school led by Rev.

One noted action was sending Calvin Fairbank to Lexington to retrieve the family of Gilson Berry.

In New Orleans he helped raise the money for the Morris Brown chapel, but his work was generally opposed by local whites and he was imprisoned at least once for each of the five years he was in that city[2] for allowing slaves to attend his sermons.

[4] In 1857 he asked that he be relieved of his position, and Bishop Daniel Payne assigned him to Louisville, Kentucky, in April, and then to Bethel church in Baltimore in May 1858.

[2] In December 1863 he was asked to superintend the organization of AME churches in Virginia and North Carolina, and in 1864 he became editor of the Christian Recorder.

He was also elected corresponding secretary of the Parent Home and Foreign Missionary Society of the AME Church.

[2] In May 1868 he was ordained bishop of the AME church, first serving a district consisting of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.

[6] He worked with Frederick Douglass and others to push for the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, pointing particularly to an 1882 incident when Bishop Payne was removed from a railroad car and forced to walk to the next station while travelling in Florida.

[7] Brown was important in the move to include women in the AME ministry, licensing Emily Calkins Stevens to preach in the New Jersey conference in 1883.