Freed Black people founded aid societies before the nation’s founding documents were drafted

Evidence

In April 1787, just one month before the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to draft the nation’s charter document, two leaders of the city’s small community of free Black people, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, founded an aid organization called the Free African Society to help formerly enslaved people get on their feet. Both had been born into slavery themselves, with Allen purchasing his freedom in his early twenties and Jones being manumitted when he was nearly forty years old. They met at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, where Allen, who had been preaching since he was a young man, would sometimes lead services for the small group of Black members. Though the Free African Society was initially a nondenominational organization, it provided services in keeping with the gospel of the church, offering various kinds of aid and support to the many widows, orphans, and sick, injured, or destitute Black people, some of them fugitives from slavery, who were arriving in great numbers in the new nation’s capital city during those years. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1026

Categorization

• XREF: The April 1787 founding just one month before the Constitutional Convention is a striking parallelism the reader could juxtapose with the Constitutional-era 1787 date anchoring the book’s reframing argument. — connects to: Freed blacks built mutual aid associations on the same pattern as white societies — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1405