The Allen–King Affair

In the winter of 1853, New York Central College’s radical promise collided with one of the deepest taboos in American life: interracial marriage.

William G. Allen, a Black professor at the college, became engaged to Mary E. King, a white student. The reaction was immediate and violent. What followed became one of the most widely discussed racial controversies connected to the college — a story of love, mob violence, exile, and the limits of Northern abolitionism.

The Professor and the Student

William G. Allen was an African American scholar, writer, and abolitionist. At New York Central College he taught Greek, German, and belles-lettres before integrated classes of Black and white students, women and men.

Mary E. King was a white student from an abolitionist family in the Fulton, New York area. Her father, Rev. Lyndon King, had anti-slavery connections, but her relationship with Allen placed the family under intense public pressure.

Their engagement appears to have become known in late 1852 or early 1853. In a college founded on equality, their relationship was possible. In the world outside the college, it was treated as a scandal.

The Mob at Phillipsville

In January 1853, Allen traveled to Phillipsville, near Fulton, to see Mary King. As news of the engagement spread, a crowd gathered. Later accounts, including Allen’s own narrative, described the mob as numbering roughly five hundred men.

The mob was not merely angry. It was armed with objects meant to humiliate and injure: tar, feathers, poles, and an empty barrel spiked with shingle nails. Allen was hidden inside while the crowd surrounded the house.

With help from sympathetic local allies, Allen escaped by sleigh and made his way to Syracuse, where the city’s abolitionist network offered a possible route of protection.

Marriage and Exile

Mary King refused to abandon Allen. Within weeks, she escaped the pressure of her family and reunited with him in New York City. They married on March 30, 1853, and soon sailed for Liverpool, England.

The couple never returned to the United States. Their life abroad was difficult, marked by teaching, writing, unstable income, and poverty. Allen later published The American Prejudice Against Color, using his own story to expose the hypocrisy of a North that claimed freedom while still enforcing racial terror.

What the Affair Revealed

The Allen–King affair revealed the limits of Northern tolerance. Many white Northerners could oppose slavery while still rejecting Black equality in daily life. Some could accept Black and white students in the same classroom, but not a Black man marrying a white woman.

The scandal brought national attention to New York Central College. Abolitionist newspapers condemned the mob, while hostile papers used the affair as proof that integrated education would lead to “amalgamation,” the period’s racist term for interracial relationships.

The affair damaged the college, but it should not be presented as the single cause of its collapse. New York Central College survived for several more years. Its decline came from a larger combination of financial weakness, political hostility, racial backlash, disease, and institutional instability.

Timeline of the Affair

What We Know / What Remains Uncertain

Sources to Consult

Primary sources for this story include William G. Allen’s The American Prejudice Against Color, contemporary newspaper coverage, abolitionist papers, and later historical studies of New York Central College and interracial marriage in the antebellum North.

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