Absalom Jones

Absalom Jones was born into slavery on 6 November 1746 in Sussex County, Delaware, and taught himself to read using a spelling book and the New Testament while working as a household servant, eventually being taken to Philadelphia by his enslaver, where he attended a Quaker-run night school and continued his self-directed education while still enslaved.

Jones purchased his wife's freedom in 1770 and his own freedom in 1784, and became deeply involved in Philadelphia's Black community and its St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church, where he and fellow congregant Richard Allen built a substantial Black congregation within the church, only to face a significant and infamous incident of racial discrimination in 1792 when they were forcibly pulled from their knees during prayer and directed to a segregated seating area.

This incident of humiliating discrimination led Jones and Allen to lead their Black congregants in walking out of St. George's entirely, and they subsequently founded the Free African Society in 1787, a mutual aid organisation providing social and economic support for Philadelphia's free Black community, one of the earliest formal Black organisations of its kind in the United States.

Jones went on to found the African Church of Philadelphia, later known as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, and in 1802 was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, becoming the first Black person ordained in that denomination's American history, a landmark religious breakthrough achieved despite significant institutional resistance to Black clergy leadership.

Jones became a significant civic and religious leader within Philadelphia's Black community, delivering influential sermons addressing slavery and racial justice, including a notable 1808 sermon marking the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and remained active in civic advocacy, including organising Black Philadelphians' response to the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, when Black community members provided crucial nursing and burial services during the crisis.

Jones died in 1818, having built lasting religious and civic institutions serving Philadelphia's Black community across several decades. He remains remembered as a foundational figure in African-American religious history, his 1792 walkout alongside Richard Allen and subsequent institution-building representing one of the earliest and most consequential instances of Black Americans establishing independent religious institutions in direct response to discriminatory treatment within predominantly white congregations.