BLACK INFRASTRUCTURES
Richard Allen, founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was illiterate.
So is it written in the history of the AME Church that was written by later AME Bishop Daniel Payne. He also writes that Bishop Allen's then 15-year old son was commonly used as the church's first secretary of annual church conferences, who recorded notable events, religious proceedings from its founding 1787 as the "Free African Society" and its formal incorporation in 1816.
Literacy was no major obstacle to Bishop Allen. He worked around it, even as he has worked around his own personal enslavement. He converted his own master from heathen to Christian by his example. Allen worked hard with his blood brother to make something of and for himself, as well as of and for the sons and daughters of Ham, living in this barren land! He was anointed !
Slaves in America did extraordinary things. This includes founding a Masonic Lodge in Massachusetts by Prince Hall, another former slave , according to a history written by Charles Wesley, there being a number of "Prince Hall's".
Hall had to acquire his African Lodge's embossing charter from the Grand Lodge of England in 1784, due to American racial bias, against black Masons by white Masons, which as yet continues .
Prince Hall was later appointed the Provincial Grand Master of North America by the Grand Lodge of England in 1791. With this authority, Grand Master Hall diligently moved about establishing other African Lodges. One was raised in Providence, Rhode Island, and another was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1797, with Absalom Jones and Richard Allen as Master and Senior Warden, as its officials.
Absalom Jones had earlier founded the first black Episcopal Church in America after leaving the Free African Society, which he and Allen had jointly formed, with others, for mutual benevolence of Africans.
Together, the AME Church and the African (Prince Hall) Grand Lodge are the oldest national institutions in black America : bedrocks of all.
By bedrock, I mean infrastructure.