It was in the North that the Negro church really burgeoned. Foremost among the Northern Negro churchmen was Richard Allen, an ex-slave who had purchased his freedom from his Delaware master in 1777, the year he also accepted Christ as his saviour. In 1786 Allen moved to Philadelphia and began to hold prayer meetings for Negroes. His efforts to establish a Negro church were opposed by whites and some Negroes. But when the officials of St. George’s Church, where Allen frequently preached, began to segregate a large number of Negroes who came to hear him, it became clear to Allen’s Negro detractors that the time was right for a Negro church. The final break came when white church officials pulled Allen, Absalom Jones, and William White from their knees while they were praying in what had been set aside as the white section of the church. An innately dramatic man, Allen led the Negroes out of St. George’s Church and organized Mother Bethel, now the central church of Negro Methodism. Allen and his followers organized what became the African Methodist Episcopal Church and by 1820 they had four thousand followers in Philadelphia alone. The organization spread as far west as Pittsburgh and as far south as Charleston. In New York City, because of discrimination and segregation Negroes withdrew from the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church and established what is now the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, one of whose leading bishops is Dr. Stephen Gill Spottswood, the current chairman of the board of the NAACP. The same trend was developing among Negro Baptists of the North. In 1809 thirteen Negro members of a white Baptist church in Philadelphia were dismissed to form a church of their own. The Negro Baptists of Boston set up their own church in the same year under the leadership of Reverend Thomas Paul. At the same time he was shepherding the Boston congregation, Rev. Paul also organized a Negro Baptist church in New York City. The church was later named Abyssinian and is now pastored by the controversial minister-politician, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.