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6 November 1746—13 February 1818

To Arise Out of the Dust

The vestry of Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church decided that it was time to act. One of the few integrated churches in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, St. George’s black membership had increased many times over thanks to the active evangelization of two black parishioners, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. So in November 1787, an alarmed vestry voted to require black members to sit in the church balcony during worship services. When Jones heard about the decision, he knew he had to defy it. On the following Sunday, he sat in the front pew of the church and was promptly thrown out. He and Allen left the church, taking most of the black parishioners with them, and founded the Free African Society (FAS).

The FAS was intended to be both an alternative nondenominational gathering of black worshippers and a relief society that offered aid financial assistance to freed slaves. Jones knew something about slavery. Born in bondage in Delaware, he was sold to a Philadelphia shopkeeper when he was sixteen. He learned to read and write by attending the night school for blacks run by Quaker Anthony Benezet and eventually managed to purchase his freedom as well as that of his wife.

In 1794, FAS members established themselves as the First African Church of Philadelphia and voted to affiliate with an official denomination. Jones and his followers decided to go with the Episcopal Church, while Allen and his followers opted for the Methodist one. Jones and his people were accepted by the Episcopal diocese—their congregation was renamed the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas—and Jones was ordained a deacon in 1795. Nine years later, he became the first black Episcopal priest, and he ministered to St. Thomas until his death.

From the very beginning, the congregation of St. Thomas, under Jones’s leadership, was defiant of slavery and racial discrimination. One of the church’s founding documents records the determination of its members “to arise out of the dust and shake ourselves, and throw off that servile fear, that the habit of oppression and bondage trained us up in.” Jones’s sermons regularly denounced slavery as a sin, urged slave owners to free their human chattel, and tried to persuade lawmakers to offer protection for runaway slaves looking to find freedom north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But Jones carried on his crusade against slavery outside of the church as well. Working with his old friend Richard Allen, he lobbied against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, a law that stripped fleeing slaves of basic human rights; petitioned Congress in 1800 to abolish the slave trade; cofounded Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee twelve years later to aid runaways and protect them from slave catchers; and campaigned strenuously against plans to exile free slaves to Liberia. In everything he did to help his people, his guiding principle was that nonviolently speaking truth to power was the key to resisting oppression.

Jones was well named: Absalom means “Father of Peace.”