A.M.E. Book Concern

1909

The African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church is the first independent Protestant denomination founded by and for African Americans. An influential institution in the Black community, the A.M.E. church also began a printing company, the A.M.E. Book Concern, in Philadelphia in 1817. Although materials such as hymns and sermons were its primary output, the A.M.E. Book Concern also published The Christian Herald (1848), which became The Christian Recorder (1852), the church’s official newspaper and the oldest Black newspaper still in circulation. By the late nineteenth century, A.M.E. Book Concern was the largest publisher of Black writers like W.E.B. DuBois, while also reprinting earlier works from Black writers and poets like Phillis Wheatley Peters.