John Jamison Moore was an American preacher and educator. [1]
Moore's achievements include writing a history of the AME Zion Church, establishing the first AME Zion church and school in San Francisco, and advocating for African-American access to education and religion through his newspaper, The Lunar Visitor. [2]
Moore was born as a slave in what is today West Virginia. At age 15, he and his mother escaped to Philadelphia to live in freedom. [3] Moore soon became involved in the African American Churches in that city. He eventually became a prominent preacher at the AME Zion Church in Philadelphia. [4]
Moore also traveled to New York City to participate in activities at the AME Zion Church there. He wrote about this church in his book, The History of The AME Zion Church in America. Founded in 1796 in the City of New York. [5] [6]
In 1852, Moore moved to San Francisco to further the church in that city. According to Bishop B.J. Walls, Moore was credited with,
"Planting the core tenets of freedom, as practiced by his denomination, on the Pacific Coast, in 1852". [7]
In 1852 Moore founded St. Cyprian AME Church, the first AME Zion Church in San Francisco. Around that time, he established a school for African-American children in the church basement, serving as teacher and principal. [3] He created the school because African-American children were barred from public schools in San Francisco. That same year, Moore founded and became head editor of The Lunar Visitor. [8] According to The First AME Zion Church's website, the Lunar Visitor, "promoted civil rights and advocated developing institutions for educational, social and political skills useful in working toward a full participation in American Society,". [3] The newspaper was also "The only African-American magazine in the western part of the country," during the period it was being printed, according to Thomas Segady. [8]
Moore later moved to Salisbury, North Carolina, where he married Francis Moore. [3] He died on December 9, 1893, on the train home from a conference in Western North Carolina. He was buried in Salisbury.. [3]
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, usually called the AME Church or AME, is a Methodist Black church. It adheres to Wesleyan-Arminian theology and has a connexional polity. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is the first independent Protestant denomination to be founded by black people; though it welcomes and has members of all ethnicities.
The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or the AME Zion Church (AMEZ) is a historically African-American Christian denomination based in the United States. It was officially formed in 1821 in New York City, but operated for a number of years before then. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church adheres to Wesleyan-Arminian theology.
The black church is the faith and body of Christian denominations and congregations in the United States that minister predominantly to African Americans, as well as their collective traditions and members. The term "black church" can also refer to individual congregations.
Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, born Jarm Logue, in slavery, was an African-American abolitionist and bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and an author of a slave narrative.
Peter Williams Jr. (1786–1840) was an African-American Episcopal priest, the second ordained in the United States and the first to serve in New York City. He was an abolitionist who also supported free black emigration to Haiti, the black republic that had achieved independence in 1804 in the Caribbean. In the 1820s and 1830s, he strongly opposed the American Colonization Society's efforts to relocate free blacks to the colony of Liberia in West Africa.
Gardner Calvin Taylor was an American Baptist preacher. He became known as "the dean of American preaching".
James Varick was the first Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Bishop Alexander Walters was an American clergyman and noted civil rights leader. Born a slave in Bardstown, Kentucky, just before the Civil War, he rose to become a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church at the age of 33, then president of the National Afro-American Council, the nation's largest civil rights organization, at the age of 40, serving in that post for most of the next decade.
Thomas James (1804–1891) had been a slave who became an African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister, abolitionist, administrator and author. He was active in New York and Massachusetts with abolitionists, and served with the American Missionary Association and the Union Army during the American Civil War to supervise the contraband camp in Louisville, Kentucky. After the war, he held national offices in the AME Church and was a missionary to black churches in Ohio. While in Massachusetts, he challenged the railroad's custom of forcing blacks into second-class carriages and won a reversal of the rule in the State Supreme Court. He wrote a short memoir published in 1886.
St. James AME Zion Church is a historic African Methodist Episcopal Zion church located at Ithaca in Tompkins County, New York. It is a two-story, frame church structure set on a high foundation and featuring a four-story entrance tower. The church structure was begun in the 1830s and modified many times since. The original stone meetinghouse was built in 1836 and is believed to be Ithaca's oldest church and one of the oldest in the AME Zion system.
African American Californians, or Black Californians are residents of the state of California who are of African ancestry. According to 2019 United States Census Bureau estimates, those identified solely as African American or black constituted 5.8% or 2,282,144 residents in California. Including an additional 1.2% who identified as having partial African ancestry, the figure was 7.0%. As of 2021, California has the largest multiracial African American population by number in the United States.
James Walker Hood was an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church bishop in North Carolina from 1872 to 1916. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, he was an active abolitionist, and during the American Civil War he went to New Bern, North Carolina where he preached for the church to the black people and soldiers in the area. He was very successful and became an important religious and political leader in North Carolina, becoming "one of the most significant and crucial African American religious and race leaders during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". By 1887 he had founded over six hundred churches in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina and erected about five hundred church buildings. He was politically and religiously active as well, supporting education, civil rights, and the ordination of women.
Joseph Charles Price was a founder and the first president of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was one of the greatest orators of his day and a leader of African Americans in the southern United States. His death at the age of 39 cut short a career that might otherwise have vied with that of Booker T. Washington.
African Americans in San Francisco, California, composed just under 6% of the city's total population as of 2019 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, down from 13.4% in 1970. There are about 55,000 people of full or partial black ancestry living within the city. The community began with workers and entrepreneurs of the California Gold Rush in the 19th century, and in the early-to-mid 20th century, grew to include migrant workers with origins in the Southern United States, who worked as railroad workers or service people at shipyards. In the mid-20th century, the African American community in the Fillmore District earned the neighborhood the nickname the "Harlem of the West," referring to New York City's Harlem neighborhood, which is associated with African American culture.
Mary J. Small (1850–1945) was a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and was the first woman to achieve the position of elder.
Bishop Singleton T. Jones was a religious leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. When he was ten years old, he was apprenticed to a lawyer and worked for him for four years, after which he found positions at an inn, as a hod carrier, and on a riverboat on the Ohio River. He became a pastor in the 1840s, serving churches throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Although he had little education, he taught himself to be an articulate orator. Besides being a pastor to churches, he also edited AME Zion publications, the Zion's Standard and Weekly Review and the Discipline.
Rev. John E. Price was an elder and minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He was a minister for around 50 years. He was the founder and president of the Garnet Equal Rights League at Harrisburg. He wrote hymns and was an editor for the Zion Church Advocate and, with William H. Day, the Zion Church Herald and Outlook, the first paper of the AME Zion Church. Day was a minister, abolitionist, and educator.
John Wesley Alstork was an American religious leader and African-American community organizer. He was a preacher and bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and is considered one of the most successful bishops of his church, in part due to his skills at organizing national conferences. He also was a trustee at several schools for African-Americans, and a businessman. He lived in Montgomery, Alabama.
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is a historic African American church founded in 1852 and is located in the Fillmore District in San Francisco, California. It was one of the earliest African American churches in the west. The church occupied several spaces in San Francisco over the course of its history, as well as gone by various names.
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