In 1780 a policy of gradual emancipation was instituted in Pennsylvania. The Quakers immediately established a Burying Place For All Free Negroes or People of Color in Byberry Township. This African Burial Ground remains an obscure anomaly, forgotten today much the same as the day it was placed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places.[8] Most of the Black population in Philadelphia were free by 1811, although some remained enslaved until the 1840s. The free community was joined by runaways from the South and refugees from the Haitian Revolution. Richard Allen and Absolom Jones founded the Free African Society in 1787, a mutual aid society, and Allen, with his wife Sarah Allen, established the Bethel African Methodist Church in 1794. During the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic, Black residents were mistakenly believed to be immune to the disease, so they worked as carriers of the dead and tended to the sick and dying inside their homes. Kidnapping of free Black residents to be sold back into slavery was a risk that continued into the 19th century, especially for children.

The story told by Philadelphia's historic Afiican American church buildings is a story of the changing role of the black church in the city. Philadelphia's first black churches emerged in the late 18th century as products of genuine Christian sentiment among several of the city's black leaders, coupled with fiiistration with the hypocrisy of racism that black congregants experienced from predominantly white congregations and a need for commimity networks with which to sxirvive in an aggressive, racially-divided city. Unwilling to endure exclusion and segregation, but firmly believing the tenets of their faith, Philadelphia's early Christian leaders established churches that could serve as havens of refiige from a predominantly white city that spumed its black population. These early churches flourished in the early nineteenth century, giving birth to off-shoot churches and inspiring numerous black Christians to found their own independent congregations both within existing denominations and outside of them. Black churches of the 18* and 19* century served as vehicles of community building and as sanctuaries from the daily pressiffes of life in the oppressive city, but the early churches did not seek to assert black rights or create movements of social protest. Instead they sought to affirm black equality with whites by creating religious institutions and structures that resembled their white coimterparts by providing for their congregants what they were denied in white churches. Architecturally, Philadelphia's first black churches. Bethel, St. Thomas, and Zoar, looked almost identical to St. George's Methodist, the white church from which they arose.