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Morris Brown

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Not to be confused withMorris Brown College,the college named in his honor.
The Right Reverend

Morris Brown
Reverend Morris Brown
ChurchAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church
PredecessorRichard Allen
SuccessorDaniel Payne
Personal details
Born(1770-01-08)January 8, 1770
Charleston, South Carolina
DiedMay 9, 1849(1849-05-09)(aged 79)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,US
DenominationAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church
Occupation2nd bishop of African Methodist Episcopal Church and shoemaker

Morris Brown(January 8, 1770 – May 9, 1849) was one of the founders of theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church,and its second presiding bishop. He foundedEmanuel AME Churchin his nativeCharleston, South Carolina.It was implicated in the slave uprising planned by Denmark Vesey, also of this church, and after that was suppressed, Brown was imprisoned for nearly a year. He was never convicted of a crime.

After his release, he took his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he worked closely with Bishop Richard Allen on expanding the church. After Allen's death, Brown was selected as the second bishop of the AME denomination. He planted new congregations and established conferences of AME churches in the American Midwest andOntario, Canada.He also mentored rising AME leaders such as the Rev.Daniel Payne,and encouraged formal education for new preachers and pastors.[1]

Early and family life

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Born on either January 8 or February 13, 1770[2]to parents who werefree people of colorinCharleston, South Carolina,Brown received no formal education. This was typical for many common people in those years before public schools were founded, and he was taught skills at home. He and his family were successful and considered part of the city's free African-American elite. Its large black population was mostly enslaved in the antebellum years.

Brown became a skilled shoemaker. After a religious experience in the Methodist Church, he received a license to preach. In this period, the Methodist and Baptist churches had evangelized to both free and enslaved African Americans. They allowed them to be preachers and members, but the church congregations usually required the people of color to sit in segregated sections.

Brown married Maria, and they ultimately had six children.

Ministry

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In 1817, Brown traveled north to Philadelphia, as he had learned that Rev.Richard Allenand 15 delegates from four northern states had founded theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Churchthere the previous year. This was the first independent black denomination in the United States. Pennsylvania courts had allowed Rev. Allen'sMother Bethel AME Churchto legally split from the Methodist denomination. Rev. Allen ordained Brown a deacon, and the following year ordained him as an elder.

Rev. Brown returned to Charleston. African-American members of the white-dominatedBethel Methodist congregationwere upset that white leaders had authorized construction of a hearse house on the site of the traditional black burying ground at the church.[3]Bethel had allowed its black members, many of whom were enslaved, to meet for worship services in its basement, as was typical of many churches in the city. As a result of loss of the burial ground, Brown left the congregation in protest.

He was joined by many African Americans from Bethel and two other Methodist congregations, who formed a separate congregation, first known as Hampstead Church. It later was named asEmanuel AME Church.The church rapidly attracted members, as blacks were a majority in Charleston. It had a membership of 1848 in 1818, made up mostly of enslaved African Americans.[4]

Denmark Vesey,also a free man of color, was among these founders and an influential leader. He was credited with planning a large-scale slave insurrection in June 1822. After white authorities crushed the plot, arresting and killing many suspects, including Vesey, they worked to suppress the Emanuel AME Church. Rev. Brown was imprisoned as a suspected collaborator for nearly a year, but never convicted. Angry whites burned his church to the ground in 1822 because of its association with the rebellion.[5]

After being released in 1822, Rev. Brown fled to Philadelphia with his wife and two young sons, as did former slave Henry Drayton, and parishioners Charles Carr and Amos Cruickshanks. James Eden and most of the dispossessed African Americans in Charleston joinedFirst Scots Presbyterian Church.Eden later sailed with the first emigrants from Charleston toLiberia,where he died many years later.[6]

In Philadelphia, Rev. Brown resumed his shoemaking craft, according to census records.[7]He also became Rev. Allen's valued assistant, and was formally named Mother Bethel's assistant pastor in 1825, and assistant bishop the following year.

Morris Brown was consecrated bishop (and Allen's putative successor) on May 25, 1828, at the denomination's General Conference. He traveled extensively to establish new congregations and conferences. AtHillsboro, Ohioin August 1830, Brown organized the denomination's western churches into the Western (later Pittsburgh) Conference. (They included 15 ministers and 1194 communicants, all in the territory between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River.)

In this period, Brown did not evangelize in the South. Beyond his history in Charleston, even free blacks could still be captured and sold into slavery. Emanuel AME church had reopened for a time in Charleston, but the state closed it and other independent black churches in 1834 due to a legislative ban afterNat Turner's slave rebellionin 1831 in Virginia. This uprising frightened the whites in slave societies. The congregation met secretly until after the Civil War.[8]

During the antebellum years the Baltimore AME conference thrived; that city had a large population offree people of color.Three AME churches were founded in Virginia before the Civil War, and in 1848 some African Americans in New Orleans requested a traveling evangelist from the General Conference.

Upon Allen's death in 1831, Brown succeeded him as the young denomination's leader.Edward Waters,who evangelized in the Midwest, was named his assistant the following year; he was consecrated as bishop during the General Conference in 1836. He resigned that position in 1844 and resumed status as an elder (and died in Baltimore on June 5, 1847).[9][10]

After Ohio began enforcing notoriousBlack Codesin 1829, and other states (including Pennsylvania in 1838) followed suit, many African Americans moved further north, including into Canada. Bishop Brown organized the Canada Conference inToronto,Ontario, in July 1840. By the Civil War, an estimated 30,000 refugee African Americans are believed to have settled in Canada, mostly in Ontario. The General Conference that year also assigned two missionaries: Elder N. Cannon to New England and ElderWilliam Paul Quinnto the West (as the Midwest was then known).

Growth within the latter also allowed its division: the Indiana conference was established at Blue River in October 1840 and Elder Quinn assigned to supervise both parts of the former Western conferences. At the May 1844 General Conference, Elder Quinn reported that he had established 47 churches with 2000 members (including one each in the slave cities ofLouisville, KentuckyandSt. Louis, Missouri). He was assisted by 20 traveling and 27 local preachers. Fifty Sunday schools had also been organized (with 2000 students), as well as forty temperance societies and 17 camp meetings. Rev. Quinn was consecrated as (suffragan) bishop and Bishop Brown's putative successor.[11]

Aware that his own limited literacy affected his preaching, Brown mentoredDaniel Payne,who had moved to Pennsylvania from Charleston in 1835 after authorities closed his school. Rev. Payne studied at theLutheran seminaryinGettysburg,then moved to Philadelphia. Beginning in 1841, he helped Bishop Brown educate the denomination's clergy. The following year, theLombard Street riotoccurred near Mother Bethel Church, reflecting racial tensions. At the General Conference of 1844, Brown helped Payne secure the adoption of a resolution requiring a regular course of study for ministers, which contributed to building the institution of the church. Payne became the denomination's first historiographer in 1848, and its sixth bishop (assisting Bishop Quinn) in 1852.[12]

While in Canada presiding at its 1844 Annual Conference, Brown suffered a stroke that affected him the rest of his life. The Philadelphia Conference granted him a $200/yr pension in 1845. He continued as active in church affairs as his health permitted.

Death and legacy

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Morris Brown died in Philadelphia on May 9, 1849. He helped expand his denomination to include six conferences, 62 elders, nearly 300 churches and more than 17,000 members.[13]His protege, Rev. Payne, delivered the eulogy.[14]

He was first buried in the former Mother Bethel Burying Ground on Queen Street.[15]Records for this were lost after the church split because of dissension over how to respond to the federalFugitive Slave Lawof 1850.[15]It required even free states to use their law enforcement to support the law and aid in recapture of refugee enslaved African Americans. Many members of the congregation wanted to resist the law, and an active group had been established in the city to do so. Brown was later reinterred, next to founding Bishop Allen, within the Mother Bethel church.

After the American Civil War, Rev. Richard Harvey Cain of Charleston's Emanuel AME Church bought a Lutheran church building in the city. (Its congregation had declined by 1866). The following year he established the Morris Brown AME Church and became its first pastor, naming it in honor of Brown.[16]

Morris Brown Collegein Atlanta, established in 1881 by the North Georgia Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was also named in honor of the bishop.[9]

References

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  1. ^Charles Spencer Smith,A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church(Book Concern of the AME Church, Philadelphia, 1922) p. 14 et seq.
  2. ^comparehttp:// blackpast.org/aah/brown-morris-1770-1849and Larry G. Murphy, J. Gordon Melton, Gary L. Ward,Encyclopedia of African American Religions,available athttps://books.google /books?id=fxsmAgAAQBAJ&dq=morris+brown+african+methodist+episcopal+grave+1849&pg=PA126
  3. ^Curtis, Nancy C. (1996).Black Heritage Sites: An African American Odyssey and Finder's Guide.Chicago:American Library Association.p. 195.ISBN978-0-838-90643-9.OCLC45885630.
  4. ^Harris, Robert L. Jr. (1981)."Charleston's Free Afro-American Elite: The Brown Fellowship Society and the Humane Brotherhood".The South Carolina Historical Magazine.82(4): 289–310.JSTOR27567708– viaJSTOR.
  5. ^Smith, pp. 14–15
  6. ^Smith p. 14
  7. ^Jacqueline Akins, "And He Shall Direct Your Path: the Bethel A.M.E. Congregation 1792–1839" (University of Pennsylvania thesis, 2004), p. 44
  8. ^"Charleston County Public Library – South, Carolina".CCPL.Retrieved2015-06-24.
  9. ^ab"Centennial Encyclopaedia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church".Seeking4truth.Retrieved2015-06-24.
  10. ^"Brown, Morris (1770–1849) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed".The Black Past. 26 April 2008.Retrieved2015-06-24.
  11. ^Smith, p. 16
  12. ^James T. Campbell,Songs of Zion: the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa(Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 37–49
  13. ^"The African American Experience".Testaae.greenwood. Archived fromthe originalon 2015-06-23.Retrieved2015-06-24.
  14. ^Nelson T. Strobert, Daniel Alexander Payne: The Venerable Preceptor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (University Press of America, 2012) at p. 55
  15. ^abNRHP Nomination form for 405–411 Queen Street, Philadelphia, p.8, available athttp:// preservationalliance /files/405-25QueenSt_Nomination.pdf
  16. ^"Where We Come From".Morris Brown AME Church.2013-03-08.Retrieved2015-06-24.
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