Daniel Coker

Religious leader, writer, and educator

• Born: c. 1780
• Birthplace: Frederick County or Baltimore County, Maryland
• Died: 1846
• Place of death: Freetown, Sierra Leone

Cofounder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Coker was a successful preacher, founder of a school in Baltimore, and writer of the earliest antislavery religious tract by an African American. A supporter of efforts to return freed slaves to Africa, he led a group of colonists to Sierra Leone, where he remained as a religious leader and administrator.

Early Life

Daniel Coker was born Isaac Wright in Maryland around 1780 to a black slave and a white indentured servant. Most accounts list as his parents Sarah Coker, a white woman, and Edward Wright, a slave whose owner is unknown. If correct, this would have rendered the later purchase of Coker’s freedom superfluous, since ownership of slave children depended on the mother’s status.

As a youth, Coker became the personal servant of his master’s son, accompanying him to school. He proved a very able learner. In his early teens, he ran away from his master and traveled to New York where he became associated with the Methodist Church and was able to continue his studies. He was certified as a lay minister.

In 1808, Coker was ordained as a deacon. He returned to Maryland to teach at the African Academy, a school founded by the Baltimore Abolition Society for the education of free African Americans. Still legally a slave, he had to keep a low profile until a Quaker abolitionist purchased and freed him.

Baltimore was unique among American cities at the time in having a large free black population—more than 20 percent of city residents in 1820. Although the public school system did not serve African American children, there was general support among the white population for basic literacy training and religious instruction for them, and no shortage of work for a young African American man capable of teaching. Coker established a school of his own in 1806 and joined the pastoral staff of the Sharp Street Methodist Church.

Life’s Work

Although the Methodist Church had from its inception emphasized ministering to free and enslaved African Americans on an equal footing with whites, and had condemned slaveholding in its General Conference of 1796, the denomination’s leadership remained entirely white. Frustrated by discriminatory treatment in an integrated congregation, a group of Baltimore African Americans founded their own prayer meeting, the Bethel Congregation, which formally separated from the Sharp Street congregation in 1801. Coker preached to both congregations, gradually gravitating toward Bethel. He became its official pastor in 1811.

In 1810, Coker published the first pamphlet written by an African American, Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister, in which the African expounds arguments against slavery based on biblical texts.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the Reverend Richard Allen was embroiled in a dispute over church governance that pitted the white Methodist hierarchy against his African American Bethel Congregation, which operated under its own charter of incorporation after 1811. In 1816, after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the legal independence of the Bethel church, Allen invited representatives of African American congregations from Baltimore, New York, and Boston to convene and draw up articles of confederation for an independent denomination. Coker was second only to Allen in influence and brought to the convention a strong sense of governance and organization. When the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was formally established in April, 1816, the delegates briefly considered him as its first bishop, but the honor went to Allen.

The AME expelled Coker for unknown reasons in 1818. At about the same time, he became active in the American Colonization Society, a movement to establish a settlement in West Africa for freed African Americans. In 1820, Coker accompanied a white agent for the society, two representatives of the federal government, and eighty-seven free African Americans to Shebro in Sierra Leone, where the British government already had established a settlement for freed slaves. The settlement foundered. When the survivors relocated to Liberia, joining a larger and better-equipped contingent of free African Americans, Coker remained in Sierra Leone.

The British governor appointed Coker superintendent of Hastings, a settlement for Africans seized from illegal slave ships. In addition to governing, Coker ministered to the Methodist congregation there, first under the auspices of the AME and later in an independent West African Methodist Church he helped found. His wife and sons joined him in 1822. Coker remained in Sierra Leone until his death in 1846.

Significance

Coker was an early, eloquent, and highly literate voice for African Americans, and the leader in setting up a system of organization and governance for the AME that helped make the denomination a mainstay of African American communities for generations to come. He also is an important figure in the history of Sierra Leone. His sons formed the nucleus of a prominent Krio (immigrant Africans, as opposed to indigenous people) family active in business, colonial administration, and church affairs. Although he is sometimes described as a missionary, Coker never was primarily a minister to native people; however, the church he founded served as an anchor for Protestant missionary efforts.

Bibliography

Bethel AME Church in Baltimore. “History of Bethel AME Church.” http://www.bethe11.org/page.php ?id=1. The Bethel church’s official Web site includes this useful and accessible history of the African Methodist Episcopal movement and its leaders.

Fyfe, Christopher. A History of Sierra Leone. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Provides good coverage of the early history of English and American efforts to resettle former slaves in Africa, including Coker’s role in the settlements.

Melton, J. Gordon. A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Offers detailed information on Coker’s career as a minister.

Moss, Hilary J. Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Compares African American education in three cities: Boston, New Haven, and Baltimore. Good general description of education and employment of free African Americans in Baltimore.

Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2008. A thorough scholarly biography providing detailed information on the emergence of black churches in postcolonial America.

Payne, Daniel Alexander. History of the African Methodist Church. 1922. Reprint. North Stratford, N.H.: Ayer, 2002. Provides historical context and insight into the founding of the AME Church and its early leaders.