The signal event of Allen's life also featured one of the great moments of African American reform: black exodus from a segregated white church. [36] One of the first 'back of the bus' moments, blacks' departure from St. George's served as an early version of Rosa Parks's sitting down on a Montgomery bus in 1955 and standing up to racial injustice. The story began sometime in the early 1790s, when Allen and other black members learned that they could not sit in their normal pews. Rather than comply with what the historian Carol George has called 'segregated sabbaths,' they bolted. [37]. Here was the beginning and rise of the African church in America. Allen himself wrote of the walkout. The incident served as a biblical parable. The Reverend Henry McNeil Turner even called it a march to the Promised Land.