Later Years
Many members who wanted more religious affiliation followed Absalom Jones when he founded the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. It opened its doors in 1794 as the first Episcopal church for blacks. Numerous members had come from the South where they had belonged to the Anglican Church before the war. In 1804, Jones was the first black to be ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States.
Richard Allen and others who wanted to continue as Methodists founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which also opened the doors of its first church building in 1794. While an independent congregation, it was still affiliated with the regional and national Methodist Church. Allen was ordained as a Methodist minister. To achieve full independence from white supervision, in 1816 Allen brought several regional AME congregations together and founded the first fully independent black denomination, the AME church. They elected him as the first bishop of the AME Church.
Read more about this topic: Free African Society
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)