On April 12, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society — the first Black mutual aid organization in the United States. They founded it eleven years after the Declaration of Independence declared all men equal, four years after the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, and in the same year the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia to write a document that would count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of political representation. The Free African Society was not founded in spite of those contradictions. It was founded because of them. Black Americans in Philadelphia understood, with complete clarity, that the new nation being constructed around them was not being constructed for them. They built their own institutions accordingly.
Richard Allen was a formerly enslaved man who had purchased his freedom, become a Methodist preacher, and built a congregation among Philadelphia’s Black community. Absalom Jones was a formerly enslaved man who had also purchased his freedom and become a lay minister. Both men had been members of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church — a white congregation that permitted Black members to worship, but in segregated conditions that became increasingly humiliating as the Black membership grew. The founding legend of the Free African Society holds that Allen and Jones walked out of St. George’s after white church officials attempted to pull Jones from his knees during prayer and direct him to the segregated section. Whether the walkout happened exactly as described, the historical reality is clear: Black Christians in Philadelphia were being systematically excluded from full participation in white religious institutions, and they responded by creating their own.
The Free African Society was not exclusively a religious organization. It was a mutual aid society — a collective institution designed to provide practical support to its members and to the broader Black community of Philadelphia. It provided financial assistance to widows and orphans. It maintained records of births, deaths, and marriages in the Black community. It organized collective responses to community crises. It functioned as a civic institution at a moment when Black Americans had no access to the civic institutions of the new nation. The Society’s founding document stated its purpose explicitly: to support one another, to care for those in need, and to pursue the moral and spiritual improvement of the community. It was, in miniature, the argument that Black Americans have been making ever since — that in the absence of institutions that include them, they will build their own.
The Free African Society gave rise to two of the most important Black institutions in American history. Absalom Jones founded St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in 1794 — the first African American Episcopal congregation in the United States. He became the first Black man ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Richard Allen founded Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794 — the congregation that would become the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. In 1816, Allen organized the first general conference of the AME Church, becoming its first bishop. The AME Church grew to become one of the largest and most influential Black institutions in America — a network of congregations that provided education, mutual aid, political organizing, and spiritual sustenance to Black communities across the country through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. It began with two men walking out of a church in Philadelphia in 1787.
The significance of the Free African Society extends beyond its direct institutional descendants. It established a pattern of Black institutional response to exclusion that would repeat across two centuries — the HBCU founding era, the Black Wall Street of Durham, the Old North State Dental Society, Mechanics and Farmers Bank, Wheeler Airlines. In every case the logic was the same: when the existing institution refused to include Black Americans, Black Americans built a parallel institution that served their community with the same professionalism, the same standards, and often greater dedication than the institution that excluded them. The Free African Society was the first expression of that logic in the history of the United States. It was founded in 1787, the year the Constitution was written. The Constitution protected slavery. The Free African Society organized against its consequences. Both documents were products of the same city in the same year. That is the Two Americas argument at its founding moment.