Religion: African Anniversary

In Philadelphia in 1787, St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church—standing today as the oldest church of the denomination in the U. S.—requested its handful of Negro members to segregate themselves at worship. Led by a prosperous teamster named Richard Allen and his friend Absalom Jones, the Negroes indignantly left the congregation, forthwith founded a benevolent organization called the Free African Society. From this group, first which U. S. Negroes formed to aid themselves socially and economically, stem all U. S. Methodist and Episcopal Negro churches. The majority of the Free Africans voted in 1791 to build an Episcopal church, and they soon affiliated it with the white, national church body. But Teamster Allen felt that Methodism was better for Negroes. He bought a blacksmith shop, began holding services, accumulated enough followers so that in 1799 he was ordained by Bishop Francis Asbury, pioneer U. S. Methodist. In 1816 the congregation of Negro Allen’s Mother Bethel Church elected him the first U. S. Negro bishop.

At Mother Bethel Church the first weekday, Sunday and night schools for Negroes were opened. Bishop Allen founded the first U. S. Negro publishing house, whence was issued in 1852 the Christian Recorder, oldest continuous Negro periodical. In 1830 U. S. Negroes met at Mother Bethel Church in their first national convention. By the time Bishop Allen died in 1831, he was worth $30,000 and his devoted followers buried him in the churchyard. Later, his tomb was incorporated in the basement of a new church, making it a shrine near which today is a Memorial Museum containing such relics as his “mourner’s bench” and his wife Sarah’s reputed corset. Last week in the dining hall adjoining these holy spots, Negroes sang hymns, ate ice cream & cake at a “Grand Educational and Sesquicentennial Concert and Social.” The African Methodist Episcopal Church was celebrating the 150th anniversary of its existence, which it dates from the time that Richard Allen left the white Methodist Church.

Most Negroes are Baptist, 3,500,000 belonging to the National Baptist Convention. The African M. E. Zion Church has 500,000 members, the Colored M. E. Church, founded with the aid of white Southern Methodists, numbers 300,000. Same 210,000 Negroes belong to black congregations of Northern Methodist jurisdiction, will be grouped in a jurisdiction of their own (against the will of many Negroes) if the proposed merger of Southern and Northern Methodists goes through (TIME, Aug. 26, 1935, et seq.). The church which Philadelphia’s Bishop Allen founded claims 1,000,000 members in the U. S., West Indies and Africa. Governed by no central authority, it has 15 bishops and a clergy of 8,000. Host to last week’s sequicentennial was Bishop David Henry Sims, 47, a broad-shouldered six-footer who, from Philadelphia, supervises 700 churches in the East and one in Bermuda.

For four years bishop of South Africa, Bishop Sims returned to the U. S. in 1936 to become Bishop of Alabama and assistant to Bishop William H. Heard. Last month, death came to 87-year-old Bishop Heard soon after he returned from Scotland where, during deliberations of the World Conference on Faith & Order, he was barred from an Edinburgh hotel, commiserated with by the Archbishop of York and Sir John Simon (TIME, Aug. 16). Bishop Sims earns $6,800 a year, rules his flocks with liberality, as contrasted with most African Methodist bishops, who generally disapprove of dancing and fun-making. But he is a disciplinarian, was quick last week to suspend the presiding elder of his Philadelphia district when he learned that that black Methodist had brawled with another clergyman, shouting “I’m the fighting cock of the Main Line, and everybody knows it.” Said Bishop Sims in dealing with the offender: “I never kill a man but when one commits suicide I bury him.”