By Rev. Kevin T. Taylor
Pastor, Israel AME Church, Albany, New York
As America prepares to mark 250 years of independence, familiar names will fill our public memory – Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton. Their portraits will grace podiums and parades. Yet one of the most consequential founders of the American experiment will again go largely unmentioned – Bishop Richard Allen, a formerly enslaved preacher who built a church when the Republic would not build a home for his people.
There were 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Each risked their lives to proclaim liberty from Britain. Yet, the truest test of that liberty was not in ink but in embodiment. Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution, was also the soil where Richard Allen was born enslaved and bought his freedom. He wasn’t one of the 56, but he lived what they only declared.
By the time Hamilton and Madison were drafting The Federalist Papers, Allen was already drafting freedom in flesh and faith. In 1787, the same year the Constitution was written, he co-founded the Free African Society, the first mutual-aid organization for free Blacks in the new republic. When white Methodists forced Black worshipers from the balcony of St. George’s Church, Allen led a walkout that birthed Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794. That act of holy defiance was its own Declaration of Independence – one that proclaimed liberty of spirit when political liberty was still denied.
Philadelphia was the nation’s brain trust and its moral battleground. While the framers debated how to balance power, Allen confronted what power ignored. During the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793, as thousands fled the city, Allen and his ecclesiastical colleague, the Rev. Absalom Jones, organized Black volunteers to nurse the sick and bury the dead. When they were later accused of profiteering, they published A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, defending their integrity and exposing a nation that praised charity in theory but distrusted it in Black hands. Their courage made visible what the Constitution did not yet include – a vision of shared humanity.
Allen’s sermons reveal a statesman’s intellect and a prophet’s fire. He believed a republic could not survive without righteousness, that the nation’s moral health was inseparable from its treatment of the oppressed. When he eulogized George Washington in 1799, he praised the president’s virtue but reminded America that “our only wish is to enjoy the liberty which he fought for.” Where the framers designed checks and balances, Allen demanded justice and mercy. Where they built a nation of laws, he built a nation of conscience.
To call Bishop Richard Allen a Founding Father is not poetic exaggeration. It is historical correction. He founded systems of governance, education, and relief when none would serve his people. He established the first Black denomination in the Western world, ensuring that faith could never again be weaponized to silence the faithful. His was the founding of a moral republic, one that has outlasted every political party and every constitutional amendment because it is anchored in divine equality.
To visit Mother Bethel AME Church today under the pastoral leadership of the Rev. Carolyn C. Cavaness is to step into that living Constitution of faith. It is as vital a pilgrimage as visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture because Mother Bethel is not only the cradle of a denomination but the conscience of a democracy. Within its walls still echoes the gospel Allen preached – that liberty without love is hollow, and equality without empathy is incomplete.
As America turns 250, the question is not whether we will celebrate our founders, but which foundations we will honor. The parchment of 1776 declared liberty. The pulpits of 1794 practiced it. The signers risked their lives to birth a nation. Allen risked his to give that nation a soul. His name may not appear on Independence Hall, but his fingerprints are all over the American conscience.
As I note in A Charge to Keep, a nation’s endurance depends not on its wealth or weapons but on its willingness to align power with principle. Richard Allen did exactly that. He turned faith into policy, suffering into structure, and hope into history. Two and a half centuries after the Revolution, his question still searches us. Will we be a people who merely declare liberty, or a people who live it?
