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. 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.

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. Under a 1664 Maryland slave law, Wright was considered enslaved because his father was enslaved. (Another source said that his mother was an enslaved black and his father white.)

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.(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. A white half-brother was said to have refused to go to school without him.

As a teenager, Wright escaped to New York. There, he changed his name to Daniel Coker and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. 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.

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. 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. Coker actively opposed slavery and wrote pamphlets in protest. In 1810, he 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". It is noted for its literary quality and because it was one of the few protest pamphlets "written and published in the slaveholding South."

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.