Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church

This guide to Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia follows Richard Allen's congregation from a walkout during a segregated prayer service in 1787 to nine years of legal battles over a church they had already built and paid for. It traces the founding of the original building at Sixth and Lombard in 1794, and the white Methodist Episcopal Church's ongoing claim to appoint its preachers and control its pulpit, a dispute that dragged through Pennsylvania courts for years. The building standing here today is the fourth raised on this same plot since Allen bought the land in 1791.