ABSTRACT
African Americans responded to discrimination by creating institutions of their own. The most enduring of these institutions was the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1790 by the Rev. Richard Allen. In 1786 he moved to Philadelphia, home to a thriving free black population, and became an itinerant preacher. Allen, Absalom Jones, and James For ten first established a secular mutual aid society called the Free African Society. Branches of the new AME church quickly appeared in Baltimore, Wilmington, and smaller towns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Black restaurants, dance halls, and saloons also dotted free black communities, and were often the only places where blacks and whites met socially. Free African Americans also published scores of newspapers and periodicals to resist discrimination and stake their claim to civil equality. Ten years later Cornish commenced publication of the Colored American, which weighed in strongly on the issue of a suitable name for the emerging African American community.
