Richard Allen (February 14, 1760 – March 26, 1831)[1] was a minister, educator, writer, and one of the United States' most active and influential black leaders.

[3] Allen said, "We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population in this country; they are our brethren, and we feel there is more virtue in suffering privations with them than a fancied advantage for a season."

Allen had an older brother and sister left with him, and the three began to attend meetings of the local Methodist Society, which was welcoming to enslaved and free Black people.

When Garrettson visited the Sturgis plantation to preach, Allen's master was persuaded that slavery was wrong, and offered enslaved people an opportunity to buy their freedom.

), and "Black Harry" Hosier's practices of horseback circuit riding routes to rural country churches and "Bible stations", visiting far off parsons and "living in the saddle", so he moved northeast to Philadelphia, a center of free Black people and the biggest city in the new United States and second only to London in the English-speaking world.

Allen regularly preached on the commons (central park) near the church, slowly gaining a congregation of nearly 50 and supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs.

Allen and Absalom Jones, also a Methodist preacher, resented the white congregants' leaders' segregation of blacks for worship and prayer.

They left St. George's to create an independent, self-reliant worship place for African Americans in the large cosmopolitan capital city.

Unfortunately, that brought on some opposition from the white church as well as the more established Black people of the community who wanted to merely "fit in" or not stir up any hard feelings.

), a non-denominational mutual aid society that assisted fugitive enslaved people from the Southern United States and new migrants coming into the city of Philadelphia.

members chose to return to the spiritual home of their youth and forefathers and affiliate with the neighborhood parishes of the former Church of England as it slowly recovered from the wartime bitterness of the Revolution after the British ministry government ending the War in the Treaty of Paris ratified in 1783 by the Confederation Congress in Annapolis.

The Anglicans, which had reorganized themselves in a newly independent America now after the Peace in 1785 with nine dioceses on the East Coast / Atlantic Ocean shores meeting and uniting in their first General Convention as renamed "The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America" (later known simply today as "The Episcopal Church, U.S.A."), with the old familiar Elizabethan era old English texts in the "Book of Common Prayer", with some minor revisions in the first American edition of 1789, replacing prayers for His Royal Majesty, the King, and ministers to those for the new President, members of the Congress, Governors and lawful state Commonwealth officials.

It was only during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and with the part-time occupation of Philadelphia as the "Patriots" / rebels' capital by the British Army that drove out most of the old English/British ministers of the old Anglican faith (priests)[11] During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones helped to organize free blacks as essential workers to care for the sick and deal with the dead.

Amid fierce debates over the causes of the disease and its potential for contagion, Rush incorrectly believed that yellow fever was not contagious and that it would be less likely to affect people of color.

They confronted accounts of the epidemic that accused the black community of being greedy opportunists, and that perpetuated the myth that African Americans had not been affected by the disease.

Mr. Absalom Jones was ordained as a Deacon (one of the earliest in American Episcopal/Anglican Church history), and nine years later, in 1804, he became the first Black person ordained in the United States as a Priest / Presbyter (Pastor) of The Episcopal Church, U.S.A. Allen and others wanted to continue in the more straightforward and more evangelical Methodist practices inspired by George Whitefield, John Wesley, and his brother Charles Wesley.

The Philadelphia congregation had to rely on visiting white ministers to consecrate the bread and wine / sacred elements in the Sunday worship service of Holy Communion / "Eucharist.

From 1797 until his 1831 death, Bishop Allen and his wife Sarah operated a station in the "City of Brotherly Love" on the Underground Railroad on the East Coast line for fugitive enslaved people fleeing from further south in the slave and border states of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

[14] The preaching style was rarely expository or written to be read, but the subject was delivered in an evangelical and extemporized manner that demanded action rather than meditation.

In December of 1799, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and sixty-nine other Black Philadelphians sent a petition to Congress urging the end of the international slave trade and a gradual emancipation plan.