Daniel Coker was born in 1780 in Maryland, just 8 years before Maryland had entered the Union (1788). He was named Isaac Wright at birth by his mother who was an English indentured-servant and his enslaved African-American father. Daniel Coker received a rudimentary education while attending school as his white half-brother’s valet. While still in school he fled to New York where he changed his name to Daniel Coker, received a more formal education and was later ordained a minister by Bishop Francis Asbury, the minister most responsible for the spread of Methodism in colonial America.
Upon secretly returning to Maryland, Coker’s friends helped him purchase his freedom which gave him the rare opportunity to boldly speak out against the institution of slavery as well as participate in activities not usually open to black Americans at the time. In 1810, Coker wrote an abolitionist pamphlet, ‘A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister’. Responding to racial discrimination in the Methodist Church, Coker called upon African American Methodists to withdraw from the white-dominated church and establish their own organization.
In 1807, Coker opened Bethel Charity School for Negroes, a school sponsored by the Colored Methodist Society of Baltimore. Coker established the school in defiance of Maryland laws forbidding the education of black people. In Baltimore, where a large number of free blacks lived, such laws were not strenuously enforced to prevent open rebellion. By 1816, the school was operating out of Bethel Church, where he became pastor.
In 1816 delegates, including Coker and Richard Allen, from five black Methodist societies gathered in Philadelphia to establish the independent African Methodist Episcopal Church. Elected as the first bishop of the new denomination, Coker declined the post, assumingly by how light his skin color was, and Allen became the first bishop. Coker was expelled from the church from 1818 for reasons unknown but was then allowed to return to his ministerial role one year later.
Daniel Coker left the United States in 1820 with 84 other African Americans who would become settlers of Liberia. Assisted by the Maryland Colonization Society, Coker was one of four AME missionaries who intended to establish the denomination in Africa.
After spending some time in Liberia, he settled in Sierra Leone, where he was the superintendent of a settlement for “recaptured” Africans and helped found the West African Methodist Church.
He died in Freetown, Liberia, in 1846 after helping to put in place his three pillars of black community development: a school, a church and a strong economic base.
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