Daniel Coker Declines First AME Bishopric

Baltimore schoolteacher and AME founder Daniel Coker was elected the first AME bishop but resigned within days, allowing Richard Allen to serve. Coker had already published 'A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister' (1810), a landmark anti-slavery pamphlet. He would later depart for Sierra Leone in 1820 as the first Black American Protestant missionary to Africa.