Daniel Coker

Daniel Coker (1780–1846), born Isaac Wright, was an African American of mixed race from Baltimore, Maryland. Born a slave, after he gained his freedom, he became a Methodist minister in 1802. He wrote one of the few pamphlets published in the South that protested against slavery and supported abolition.^[1] In 1816, he helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States, at its first national convention in Philadelphia.

In 1820, Coker took his family and immigrated to the British colony of Sierra Leone, where he was the first Methodist missionary from a Western nation. There Coker founded the West Africa Methodist Church.^[2]

His descendants are member of the prestige Coker family who are one of Nigeria's most aristocratic and elite families and hold a lot of influence in business and politics. An affluent district in Lagos, Coker, is named after this family. All are descendants from Daniel Coker. Other notable members include Folorunsho Coker, High Chief Dr F.B.A. Coker; a renowned doctor now in his 90s who has been one of the most prominent doctors in Nigeria's history and High Chief G.B.A Coker, a Justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court, serving from 1964 until 1975. Other siblings of F.B.A Coker and G.B.A Coker have been heavily successful in their own right. Such as Mr. F.C.O. Coker, an Oxford Educated charted accountant, Lagos Municipal Treasurer and Secretary to the first Lagos State Government. F.C.O Coker was on the board of the first Lagos state government and played a key role in economic policy and created a tax system that is still used to this day. Mrs. Oye Akintola-Williams nee Coker (Mama MUSON), who later became a professional health nurse, patron of the arts and ardent environmentalist. She was married to Chief Akintola Williams CBE, the first indigenous African chartered accountant and regularly described as the Doyen of Nigerian Accountancy. He opened the first indigenous professional services firm in the country which eventually merged with Deloitte to become Akintola Williams Deloitte. As brothers-in-law, G.B.A. Coker and Chief Williams worked together on many occasions and Williams was involved in the Coker Commission where G.B.A. Coker was the judge in the trial of Obafemi Awolowo, that found him guilty of malpractice and sent to prison, resulting in a huge shift in the political climate of Nigeria. Obafemi Awolowo was a Nigerian nationalist and politician who played a key role in Nigeria's independence movement (1957–1960). The remaining siblings would include Mrs. Hilda Omolola Johnson nee Coker SRN, SCM, a future founder and matron of Logemo Hospital; Chief H.T.O. Coker SAN, OON, KC who later became a successful lawyer and who won many cases against the likes of Chief Frederick Rotimi Williams The only surviving sibling, High Chief (Dr.) F.B.A. Coker, OON, KJW, a Trinity educated consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, boardroom guru and owner of Victoria Island Consultancy and Hospital Services.  Chief (Dr.) F.B.A. Coker would grow up to be a titan in the Nigerian medical field with an international reputation; his hospital carried out the autopsy of Moshood Abiola and was involved in a number of other high-profile operations. He was also the senior gynaecologist to multiple Nigerian Presidents such as Murutala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo. Chief Dr F.B.A. Coker was the personal physician to Fela Kuti, a pioneer in Afrobeat's and the most notable Nigeria musician of the 20th Century before he died in Coker's hospital in Victoria Island. He is a confidante to the Oba (King) of Lagos and sits on the Oba's board of directors A major player in the construction industry, his office building in Victoria Island, FABAC Centre, includes tenants such as Main One, Austrian Embassy and Adeniyi Coker Consultants Limited (ACCL). ACCL is run and owned by two of Coker's son's and is one of the top 3 largest architectural firms in Nigeria. His youngest son, Dele Coker was the director of the Nigerian Rugby Football Federation and took them on multiple international tours around Africa and Dubai and has contributed significantly to the promotion of grassroots rugby in Nigeria. Coker's grandchildren are amongst Nigeria's elite social scene and rub shoulders with other prominent members of society.

He was born into slavery as Isaac Wright in 1780 in Baltimore, or Frederick County, Maryland, to Susan Coker, a white woman, and Edward Wright, an enslaved African American.^[3] Under a 1664 Maryland slave law, Wright was considered enslaved because his father was enslaved.^[4][5] (Another source said that his mother was an enslaved black and his father white.)^[1]

Beginning in the colonial period, Maryland had added restrictions on unions between white women and enslaved Black people. Under a 1692 Maryland law, white women who had children with enslaved people would be punished by being sold as indentured servants for seven years and binding their mixed-race children to serve indentures until the age of twenty-one if the woman was married to the enslaved person, and until age thirty-one if she was not married to the father.^[6][4][5](Such interracial marriages were later prohibited by law.) Growing up in a household with his white Coker half-brothers, Wright attended primary school with them, serving as their valet.^[3] A white half-brother was said to have refused to go to school without him.^[2]

As a teenager, Wright escaped to New York. There, he changed his name to Daniel Coker and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church.^[3] Coker received a license to preach from Francis Asbury, a British missionary who had immigrated to the United States and planted numerous frontier churches during his career. He also rode large circuits to minister to people on the frontier.^[5]

Coker later returned to Baltimore. For a time, he passed as his white half-brother. Friends helped him purchase his freedom from his enslaver to secure his legal status. As a free man of color, he could teach at a local school for black children.^[5] Baltimore was a center of a growing population of free people of color, including several individuals manumitted after the Revolutionary War.

In 1802, Francis Asbury ordained Coker as a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He actively opposed slavery and wrote pamphlets in protest. In 1810, Coker wrote and published the pamphlet Dialogue between a Virginian and an African minister, described by historian and critic Dorothy Porter as resembling a "scholastic dialogue".^[1] It is noted for its literary quality and because it was one of the few protest pamphlets "written and published in the slaveholding South."^[1]

While working at Sharp Street Church, Coker began to advocate for black Methodists to withdraw from the white-dominated church. He founded the African Bethel Church, which later became known as Bethel A.M.E. Church.^[3]

In 1807, Coker founded the Bethel Charity School for Black children. One of his students was William J. Watkins, who became an abolitionist and opposed the proposed resettlement of free American blacks in Africa.^[7] Coker himself later participated in such colonization.

In 1816, Coker traveled to Philadelphia, where he represented his church and collaborated with Richard Allen of that city in organizing the national African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was founded by several congregations, mostly in the mid-Atlantic region, as the first independent black denomination in the United States. The delegates elected Coker as the first bishop, but he deferred to Allen.^[5] The latter minister had founded the first AME Church in Philadelphia, known as Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, and encouraged the planting of new congregations in the mid-Atlantic region. Coker represented Bethel A.M.E. Church (founded 1787/1797) in Baltimore.^[8]

Coker encountered difficulties after his return to Baltimore. In 1818, church elders dismissed him from the Connection because of "undisclosed charges"; the following year, he was readmitted but could preach only with the approval of a local minister. Although he continued teaching, he could not support his family. In 1820, he decided to emigrate with his family as a missionary to Africa under the aegis of the American Colonization Society (ACS).^[5]

Early in 1820,^[9] Daniel Coker sailed for Africa on board the Elizabeth. He was among 86 African-American emigrants assisted by the ACS. Made up of various leaders from the northern and southern United States, the ACS advocated resettling free African Americans in West Africa. Both enslavers and some abolitionists supported the enterprise, the former believing that free people of color threatened the stability of the southern slave society.

The passengers on the Elizabeth were the first African-American settlers of the Colony of Liberia, a private colony organized by the ACS with financial support from the United States government.

The ACS planned to settle a colony at Sherbro Island, now within Sierra Leone, which was then a British colony. The newcomers were not used to the local diseases and quickly became ill. The area was swampy, resulting in many mosquitoes that carried disease. All but one of the twelve white colonists and one-third of the African Americans died, including three of the four missionaries. Just before dying, the expedition's leader (Samuel Bacon) asked Coker to take charge of the venture. He helped the remaining colonists get through their despair and survive.^[10]

Coker led the group to seek another location on the mainland. He and his family settled in Hastings, Sierra Leone, a newly founded village about 15 miles from the first settlement of Freetown. It was intended for Liberated Africans freed by the British Navy from illegal slave ships, as Britain and the United States had banned the transatlantic slave trade. Hastings was one of several new villages developed by the Church Missionary Society, which was active in the colony.^[11] Coker became the patriarch of a prominent Creole family, the Cokers. Coker's son, Daniel Coker Jr., became a leader in the town of Freetown.^[12] Coker descendants still reside in Freetown and are among the prominent Creole families. Other members of the expedition settled in what became Liberia.

In 1891 Henry McNeal Turner, the 12th bishop of the A.M.E. Church, elaborated on Coker's achievements, writing,

"It would seem, from all I can learn, that Coker played a prominent part in the early settlement of Liberia. The first Methodist Church established here was the African M. E. Church; but by whom established I cannot say. Tradition says it was afterward sold out to the M. E. Church. Besides the probability of Rev. Daniel Coker's having established our church here, he also played a mighty part among the early settlers of Sierra Leone. His children and grandchildren are found there to-day."^[13]

• Liberia
• Sierra Leone
• Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church
• Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church and Community House
• Paul Cuffe
• Henry McNeal Turner
• David Brion Davis
• Lott Cary

• Turner, H.M. (1893). African Letters, electronic edition. Nashville, TN: Publishing House A.M.E. Sunday School Union; Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina.
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/740557.stm
• Maclin, H. T.; Anderson, Gerald H. (1999). "Coker, Daniel". Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (reprint ed.). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 9780802846808.
• Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic by James Sidbury
• Journal of Daniel Coker, a Descendant of Africa: From the Time of Leaving By Daniel Coker
• Bethel, Elizabeth Rauh (15 January 1999). The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Antebellum Free Communities. ISBN 9780312218362.
• Chapter 7 "Edward Jones: An African American in Sierra Leone." in Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World by Nemata Blyden
• http://www.hastingsandryecons.org.uk/index.php?sectionid=3&pagenumber=97
• https://web.archive.org/web/20070729075256/http://www.hastingsbme.org.uk/newsletter/BMESpring07new.pdf
• Park, Eunjin (2001). "White" Americans in "Black" Africa: Black and White American Methodist Missionaries in Liberia, 1820-1875. ISBN 9780815340270.
• Duignan, Peter; Gann, L. H. (24 April 1987). The United States and Africa: A History. p. 93. ISBN 9780521335713.
• Brawley, Benjamin Griffith (June 2004). A Social History Of The American Negro. ISBN 9781419103414.

• Newman, Richard; Rael, Patrick; Lapsansky, Phillip; Coker, Daniel (2001). "Chapter 3: Daniel Coker". Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860. New York, NY: Routledge. p. 52. ISBN 0-415-92443-X.
• Davis, David B. (May 21, 2011). "UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism presents: Exodus Black Colonization and Promised Lands". US Slave blogspot, video lecture. UC Berkeley Graduate Council. Retrieved 2012-05-18.