Morris Brown

Morris Brown (January 8, 1770 – May 9, 1849) was one of the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and its second presiding bishop. He founded Emanuel AME Church in his native Charleston, South Carolina as well as conferences of AME churches in the American Midwest and Canada.

Born on either January 8 or February 13, 1770 to free blacks in Charleston, Brown received no formal education but was considered part of the city's African American elite. He became a shoemaker, and after a religious experience in the Methodist Church, received a license to preach.

Brown married Maria, and they ultimately had six children.

In 1817, Brown traveled north to Philadelphia, where Rev. Richard Allen and 15 delegates from four northern states had founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church the previous year, shortly after Pennsylvania courts had allowed Rev. Allen's Mother Bethel AME Church to legally split from the Methodist denomination. Rev. Allen ordained Brown a deacon, and an elder the following year.

Rev. Brown returned to Charleston where soon a dispute with the white Bethel Methodist congregation (which had allowed African Americans to meet in its basement) over the former African American graveyard led many African Americans (former members of the Bethel and two other Methodist congregations) to form a separate congregation, which later became known as Emanuel AME Church.

In 1821, after white authorities announced the crushing of a slave insurrection plot of Denmark Vesey, an important figure in the Emmanuel AME Church, which had grown to over 1400 members, Rev. Brown was imprisoned as a suspected collaborator for nearly a year, but never convicted. Nonetheless, his church was burned to the ground and formally closed.

Upon his release 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 a majority of the dispossessed South Carolinians joined the First Scots Presbyterian Church, and Eden later sailed with the first emigrants from Charleston to Liberia, where he died many years later. In Philadelphia, Rev. Brown resumed his shoemaking craft according to census records. 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.

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