His walk of outrage altered history

AS IF on cue, winter clouds parted and bright sunlight flooded through the jewel-like stained glass windows of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, on 6th Street near Lombard, just as yesterday's celebration of the 250th anniversary of Bishop Richard Allen's birth began.

Allen - a freed former slave who courageously walked out of a segregated, racially-intolerant St. George's Methodist Church here in the late 1700s and eventually helped create, in 1816, the African Methodist Episcopal Church - was honored with a spiritual warmth that rivaled the brightness of that sudden sunlight.

A sprinkling of spectacular ladies' hats in crimson, purple, orange - and one in sparkling layers of red, green and gold - bloomed amid the forest of somber earth-tone suits like a promise of spring in the depths of Philadelphia's snowbound winter.

The Rev. Mark K. Tyler, Mother Bethel's pastor - who, around his neck, wore a cross made from floorboard nails from St. George's - said that he was standing by Allen's tomb in the church's basement museum yesterday morning, reading the history of Allen's deeds inscribed there, when he was struck by the last line: "Reader, go thou, and do likewise."

The Rev. Fred Day, pastor of the present-day St. George's, on 4th Street near New, which has long reconciled with Mother Bethel and African Methodism, decried his church's racist behavior toward Allen, then marveled at the warm spiritual fellowship that the two churches enjoy today.

Mayor Nutter, who stayed for the whole three-hour service, said that Mother Bethel Church is just as important to American history as Independence Hall "down the street" because of its pivotal role in securing religious freedom for African-Americans.

"Thank you, Richard Allen, for walking out of the [St. George's] church so I could walk into the mayor's office," Nutter said.

Jeffrey N. Leath, a former pastor of Mother Bethel who was visiting from his post in South Africa, decried "a noted scholar" who once said that he would not "be part of a religion where God did not look like me."

Leath got a houseful of hearty amens when he amended that thought by declaring that he personally "would not be a part of a religion where I served a God who did not love me."

In his sermon, Bishop Richard Franklin Norris Sr., noted that even after Allen, a former slave, had bought his freedom, some slave traders bound him in chains and were transporting him through the streets of Philadelphia with the intent to sell him back into bondage.

Smiling at Nutter, Norris said that the city's mayor recognized Allen, freed him from his chains and arrested his captors.

Yesterday's celebration concluded with the unveiling of the "Anvil for Allen" - a story quilt of Allen's life by Gale Gaines, a Mother Bethel Church member and an adjunct fashion-design faculty member at Moore College of Art.

Wrapped around an anvil that is symbolic of the blacksmith shop that once stood on the church's land, the quilt's patches depict Allen's story in intricate detail - from African slave ships crossing the ocean to the founding of Mother Bethel Church.

The hauntingly beautiful story quilt will be on permanent exhibit in the church's museum - not far from Allen's tomb, inscribed with the activist words that inspired Pastor Tyler yesterday: "Reader, go thou, and do likewise."