Reunited Methodists
On a sad but pivotal day in the late 1780s, several of the African American members of Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Church were thrown out of the church by the congregation’s white leaders because of their refusal to sit in a blacks-only gallery area. Those African American Christians eventually went on to form what would become the first congregation of the African American Methodist Episcopal Church, Mother Bethel A.M.E.
Now, 200 years after racism divided black from white at St. George’s Methodist, members of the modern-day congregations of St. George’s and Mother Bethel have reunited.