This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

Few Americans know the extraordinary story of Richard Allen, who rose from slavery in

colonial America to become a prosperous entrepreneur and inspirational preacher in the early

republic.

Rich Newman is an historian at Rochester Institute of Technology who's been researching Richard

Allen for over 20 years.

Rich wrote the acclaim book Freedom's Prophet, Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church,

and the Black Founding Fathers. Let's take a listen.

If you don't know about Richard Allen, he's probably the most important figure in the founding era of American history that you've either not learned about or need to learn about.

So who was Richard Allen?

He was born to slavery in either Philadelphia or Delaware in 1760.

He was one of six siblings.

We also know that his mother and father loved him very much,

but the family was split up by bondage when he was young.

But Richard Allen got religion, as they say, when he was a teenager.

In the mid-1770s, just as the American Revolution was kicking into high gear,

Richard Allen joined groups of traveling Methodist preachers who roamed the countryside in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and he felt really inspired by their word. African-Americans

like Richard Allen thought that evangelical religion

offered a key to their own liberation. So Richard Allen became a devoted follower of the Methodist

Church. He went to class study sessions to learn more about the Bible. He listened to the orations

...