| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism. By J. Gordon Melton. (Lanham: Rowman Littlefield, 2007. xii, 317 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-0-7425-5264-7. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7425-5265-4.)

Many accounts of the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) point to the spontaneous exodus of Richard Allen and other African Americans from the racially segregated St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in November 1787, after being pulled up off of their knees by church officials during prayer for inadvertently kneeling near whites in the worship service. J. Gordon Melton's thoughtful and meticulous A Will to Choose, however, demonstrates that the impetus for African American Methodism began much earlier in American history; the interrelationship with white traditions is more intricately interconnected and the geographic scope much broader than the historiography suggests.

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