Name: Bishop Richard Allen
Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Time: 1760 -1831 A.D.
After he and a group of African Americans
were eventually forced to leave St. George Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794, Richard Allen exercised his intelligence and independence
as an American pioneer to organize his own church, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Even before
he became Bishop of Bethel A.M.E., he and a small group of forward thinking African Americans formed the Free African Society
in 1787. Mr. Allen is just one example of thousands of free black American intellectuals who lived free and righteous
in pre-Emancipation Proclamation America. Awareness of his existence alone should totally eradicate the false concept
that all blacks in America prior to 1863 were slaves.
Name: Mr. David Walker
Place: Wilmington, North Carolina & Boston, Massachusetts
Time: 1785 - 1830 A.D.
Mr. David
Walker was born in 1785, a free man in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a young man he traveled the deep south to execute an intellectual
study of the mental and physical destruction of enslaved blacks. After he seen enough, Mr. Walker moved up north to Boston, Massachusetts
and established a clothing business to maintain his sustenance while he created his document to direct the mental and physical
reconstruction of his brothers and sisters in slavery. He titled his work David Walker's Appeal To the Coloured Citizens of the World,
But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. In his Appeal, Mr. Walker exposed Thomas Jefferson's
ignorant claims of African inferiority as expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia. Mr. Walker's Appeal To the Coloured
Citizens challenged state laws prohibiting blacks to read and write, exposed how slave masters used religion as a control mechanism,
proclaimed America belonged to blacks the same as whites, provided significant historical facts about Africans' contributions to world
civilization and ultimately urged enslaved blacks to die fighting for their freedom rather than continue living enslaved. Mr.
Walker is another example of a free pre-Emancipation Proclamation black man whose existence must totally eradicate false
concepts of black people who lived prior to1863.
