Allen University

Allen University
Chappelle Administration Building — Columbia, South Carolina

History

Allen University was founded in 1870 by the Seventh District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — just five years after the end of slavery — as Payne Institute in Cokesbury, South Carolina. Its founding reflected the AME Church’s conviction that education and spiritual formation were inseparable, and that the training of Black leaders was a religious obligation. The institution was renamed Allen University in 1880 in honor of Richard Allen, the formerly enslaved Philadelphia minister who founded the AME Church in 1816 after he and other Black worshippers were forcibly removed from the gallery of St. George’s Methodist Church.

The university moved to Columbia in 1880 and established its present campus on Harden Street. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Allen was central to the institutional life of the AME Church in South Carolina, providing clergy, teachers, and civic leaders for Black communities across the Carolinas and beyond. Its graduates served as ministers in AME congregations, teachers in segregated schools, and advocates in a period when such advocacy required extraordinary courage.

Allen University’s Columbia campus placed it at the center of South Carolina’s civil rights activity. Columbia was the site of the 1956 South Carolina NAACP demonstrations and other campaigns against segregation, and Allen students participated in movement activity throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, students and faculty affiliated with Allen were involved in the civil rights struggle that culminated in the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, in which South Carolina state troopers killed three students at nearby South Carolina State University.

The university operates today as a four-year liberal arts institution with programs in business, education, humanities, and the social sciences, maintaining its historic AME Church affiliation and its commitment to training leaders for service. In December 2025 the board of trustees declined to renew the contract of President Ernest McNealey, who had led the university for more than nine years, and installed Dr. Stanley Jerome Pritchett, Sr. as interim president, alongside a newly constituted executive leadership team and recently seated trustees. The university is preparing for its decennial SACSCOC reaffirmation of accreditation in 2027, with institutional priorities centered on academic quality, financial sustainability, and infrastructure investment.

Bishop Richard Allen and the AME Church Legacy

Richard Allen was born into slavery in Philadelphia in 1760, purchased his own freedom, and became a Methodist minister. In 1787, he was pulled from his knees during prayer at St. George’s Methodist Church because Black worshippers were no longer permitted to pray in the main sanctuary. Allen’s response was to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 — the first independent Black denomination in American history. The AME Church became not only a spiritual home but an organizational infrastructure for Black education, mutual aid, and political organizing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Allen University, named for its founder, carries that tradition directly.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. We are expanding this section as records are verified.

Source notes: Richard Allen, The Life, Experience and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (1793); Allen University institutional archives; Carol V.R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760–1840 (1973); I. DeQuincey Newman biographical records, South Carolina Senate archives.