## The Church and Its Founding Context
The founding of First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles in 1872 situates Biddy Mason in a specific institutional tradition and a specific moment in that tradition’s history. Understanding both makes the founding more meaningful than a simple account of a religious congregation beginning its organizational life.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church had been founded in Philadelphia in 1816 by Richard Allen and other Black Methodists who had experienced discrimination in St. George’s Methodist Church — specifically, the humiliation of being physically removed from the section of the church they had chosen to pray in and directed to segregated seating. Allen’s response was not to leave Methodism but to organize a Black Methodist institution that would practice the same faith in conditions of dignity and equality among its members. The AME Church was, from its founding, both a religious institution and a form of community resistance to racial subordination.
By 1872, the AME Church had a presence across the country. It had been active in the antebellum period as an institution that harbored freedom seekers and provided organizational infrastructure for resistance to slavery. During the Civil War, AME clergy had served as chaplains and organizers in the Black regiments of the Union Army. In the Reconstruction period, the church was deeply involved in the political and educational life of the freed Black communities of the South, establishing schools and providing organizational infrastructure for the new freedpeople.
The establishment of a Los Angeles branch in 1872 brought this institutional tradition to California’s growing Black community. The founding in Mason’s home on Spring Street was not simply a matter of convenience. It was a statement that this institution was grounded in the community life that Mason represented and had been building since her emancipation. The church was born in the space she had created, organized in part by the man her daughter had married, funded through her resources, and given its initial meeting-place by her household.