Mother Bethel AME Church

Mother Bethel began with a walkout. Richard Allen — born enslaved in 1760, freed by his own purchase in 1783 — preached at St. George's Methodist in Philadelphia until the morning the trustees tried to force the Black congregants into a newly built segregated balcony, physically pulling them from their knees at prayer. Allen and Absalom Jones led the congregation out. It was the founding act of Black institutional America.

Allen bought the lot at Sixth and Lombard in 1791, purchased a blacksmith shop, and had it hauled to the site by his own horses — the 'Blacksmith Shop Meeting House' dedicated by Bishop Asbury in 1794 on what is now the oldest parcel of land in the United States continuously owned by African Americans. In 1816, delegates from Black Methodist congregations across the region met at Bethel and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first independent Black denomination in the country — and elected Allen its first bishop.

The congregation has worshipped on the same corner for 230 years — through four buildings, the current one raised in 1888–90. Richard and Sarah Allen are buried at the church; Jarena Lee preached there when women were barred from pulpits elsewhere; after the Civil War its missionaries went south to plant churches among the freed. The walkout that founded it is still the doctrine: a church built by people who would not kneel where they were told to kneel.

Mother Bethel is the archive's founding file — the church built from a hauled blacksmith shop on the corner where the oldest continuously Black-owned land in America holds the denomination that began with a walkout.