In 1796 a congregation in New York consisting of James Varick and others also withdrew from the main body of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and in 1800 dedicated a house of worship.  For a number of years it had the oversight of the older organization, but after preliminary steps in 1820, on June 21, 1821, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was formally organized.  To the first conference came 19 preachers representing 6 churches and 1,426 members.  Varick was elected district chairman, but soon afterwards was made bishop.  The polity of this church from the first differed somewhat from that of the A.M.E. denomination in that representation of the laity was a prominent feature and there was no bar to the ordination of women.

Of denominations other than the Baptist and the Methodist, the most prominent in the earlier years was the Presbyterian, whose first Negro ministers were John Gloucester and John Chavis.  Gloucester owed his training to the liberal tendencies that about 1800 were still strong in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and in 1810 took charge of the African Presbyterian Church which in 1807 had been established in Philadelphia.  He was distinguished by a rich musical voice and the general dignity of his life, and he himself became the father of four Presbyterian ministers.  Chavis had a very unusual career.  After passing “through a regular course of academic studies” at Washington Academy, now Washington and Lee University, in 1801 he was commissioned by the General Assembly of the Presbyterians as a missionary to the Negroes.  He worked with increasing reputation until Nat Turner’s insurrection caused the North Carolina legislature in 1832 to pass an act silencing all Negro preachers.  Then in Wake County and elsewhere he conducted schools for white boys until his death in 1838.  In these early years distinction also attaches to Lemuel Haynes, a Revolutionary patriot and the first Negro preacher of the Congregational denomination.  In 1785 he became the pastor of a white congregation in Torrington, Conn., and in 1818 began to serve another in Manchester, N.H.

After the church the strongest organization among Negroes has undoubtedly been that of secret societies commonly known as “lodges.”  The benefit societies were not necessarily secret and call for separate consideration.  On March 6, 1775, an army lodge attached to one of the regiments stationed under General Gage in or near Boston initiated Prince Hall and fourteen other colored men into the mysteries of Freemasonry.[1] These fifteen men on March 2, 1784, applied to the Grand Lodge of England for a warrant.  This was issued to “African Lodge, No. 459,” with Prince Hall as master, September 29, 1784.  Various delays and misadventures befell the warrant, however, so that it was not actually received before April 29, 1787.  The lodge was then duly organized May 6.  From this beginning developed the idea of Masonry among the Negroes of America.  As early