What outspoken abolitionist and author of "An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World" was also the father of one of the first black men to pass the Massachusetts bar?
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Edward G. Walker Edward Garrison Walker, also known as Edwin Garrison Walker (1830–1901), was an American artisan in Boston who became an attorney in 1861; he was one of the first black men to pass the Massachusetts bar. He later became a politician and in 1866, nine years after the state extended the franchise to African-American men, he and Charles Lewis Mitchell were the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature. Walker was the son of Eliza and David Walker, an abolitionist who had written an appeal in 1829 calling for the end of slavery.
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David Walker (abolitionist) David Walker (September 28, 1796August 6, 1830) was an outspoken African-American abolitionist, writer and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was a slave, his mother was free so therefore he was free. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, he published "An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World", a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against oppression and injustice.
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Theodore Parker Theodore Parker (August 24, 1810 – May 10, 1860) was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and popular quotations would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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John Punch (slave) John Punch (fl. 1630s, living 1640) was an enslaved African who lived in the Colony of Virginia during the seventeenth century. In July 1640, the Virginia Governor's Council sentenced him to serve for the remainder of his life as punishment for running away to Maryland. In contrast, two European men who ran away with him were sentenced to longer indentures but not the permanent loss of their freedom. For this reason, historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "ﬁrst legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.
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David Ruggles David Ruggles (March 15, 1810 – December 16, 1849) was an African-American abolitionist in Manhattan, New York who resisted slavery by his participation in a Committee of Vigilance and the Underground Railroad to aid fugitive slaves reach free states. He was a printer in New York City during the 1830s, who also wrote numerous articles, and "was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time." He claimed to have led more than 600 fugitive slaves to freedom in the North, including Frederick Douglass, who became a friend and fellow activist. Ruggles is also credited with opening the first African American bookstore in the United States.
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson Thomas Wentworth Higginson (December 22, 1823 – May 9, 1911) was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. He was active in the American Abolitionism movement during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862–1864. Following the war, Higginson devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed slaves, women and other disfranchised peoples.
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Daniel Faunce Daniel Worcester Faunce (January 3, 1829 – January 3, 1911) was an American clergyman and the father of William Faunce, born at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Graduating from Amherst College in 1850, he then studied at the Newton Theological Institution, was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1853, and thereafter held charges from 1853 to 1866 in Somerville, Worcester, and Malden — all in Massachusetts — in Concord, New Hampshire (1866–1875), Lynn, Massachusetts (1875–1881), Washington, D.C. (1881–1889), West Newton, Massachusetts (1889–1893), and Pawtucket, Rhode Island (1894–1899). He was a member of the board of managers of the American Baptist Missionary Union. His works include:
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Roger Hooker Leavitt Col. Roger Hooker Leavitt (July 21, 1805 – July 17, 1885) was a prominent landowner, early industrialist and Massachusetts politician who with other family members was an ardent abolitionist, using his home in Charlemont, Massachusetts as an Underground Railroad station for slaves escaped from the South. The escaped slave Basil Dorsey lived in Leavitt's home for nearly six years until eventually settling in Florence, Massachusetts.
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William Still William Still (October 7, 1821 – July 14, 1902) was an African-American abolitionist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, conductor on the Underground Railroad, businessman, writer, historian and civil rights activist. Before the American Civil War, Still was chairman of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and directly aided fugitive slaves and kept records to help families reunite. After the war, he remained an important businessman and philanthropist, as well as used his meticulous records to write an account of the underground system and the experiences of many refugee slaves, entitled "The Underground Railroad Records" (1872).
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Philip Alexander Bell Philip Alexander Bell (1808-1886) was a 19th century American newspaper editor and abolitionist. Born in New York City, he made his first public speech at the 1832 Colored Convention, and was active in a variety of issues, including abolition, suffrage, and the protection of fugitives. As a young man, he worked for William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. In 1837, he started the New York City newspaper "The Weekly Advocate" edited by Samuel Cornish, later renamed the "Colored American" and co-owned by Charles Bennett Ray. In 1860, he moved to San Francisco where he became co-editor of the African-American newspaper "The Pacific Appeal" and later, founder and editor of "The San Francisco Elevator" during the Reconstruction Era.
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Thomas Dalton (abolitionist) Thomas Dalton (1794–1883) was a free African American raised in Massachusetts who was dedicated to improving the lives of people of color. He was active, at times with his wife Lucy Lew Dalton, in the founding or ongoing activities of local educational organizations, including the Massachusetts General Colored Association, New England Anti-Slavery Society, Boston Mutual Lyceum, and Infant School Association, and campaigned for school integration, which was achieved in 1855.
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John Marrant John Marrant (June 15, 1755 – April 15, 1791) was one of the first African-American preachers and missionaries. He wrote three books about his experiences as a preacher.
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Albion W. Tourgée Albion Winegar Tourgée (May 2, 1838 – May 21, 1905) was an American soldier, Radical Republican, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, established the historically black women's college Bennett College, and litigated for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in the famous segregation case "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896). Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgée with introducing the metaphor of "color-blind justice" into legal discourse.
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William H. Lewis William Henry Lewis (November 28, 1868 – January 1, 1949) was an African-American pioneer in athletics, law and politics. Born in Virginia as the son of freedmen, he went to college in Massachusetts, where he became one of the first African-American college football players, and the first in the sport to be selected as an All-American. In 1903 Lewis was the first African American to be appointed as an Assistant United States Attorney; in 1910 he was the first to be appointed as one of the five United States Assistant Attorneys General, despite opposition by the Southern Democratic block; and in 1911 he was the among the first African Americans to be admitted to the American Bar Association.
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Austin Steward Austin Steward (1793 – February 15, 1869) was an African-American abolitionist and author. He was born a slave and escaped from Virginia at about age 21, settling in Rochester, New York, and then Canada. His autobiography, "Twenty-Two Years a Slave", was published in 1857.
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Henry Wilkins Chandler Henry Wilkins Chandler (September 22, 1852 - 1938) was an American lawyer, politician, and abolitionist. Born as a freeman, he was the first African American graduate from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He was a member of a class in which two-thirds of them were former slaves, and was personally recruited by the college's founder, Oren Burbank Cheney.
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Edward Hutchinson (mercer) Edward Hutchinson (c. 1564 - 1632) was a mercer and a resident of Lincolnshire, England, most noted for the careers of his children in New England. While his father and several of his uncles and brothers became prominent as clergymen, aldermen, sheriffs, and mayors in the city of Lincoln, Edward focused his efforts on his business after moving to the town of Alford. Remarkably, not a single record for him has been found in Alford, other than his burial and the baptisms of his 11 children, but he likely gained a considerable estate, and his children married into prominent families. What was most exceptional about Edward Hutchinson occurred following his 1632 death. Beginning in 1634, five of his nine surviving children and his widow immigrated to New England, and all six of them were exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a result of the events of the Antinomian Controversy from 1636 to 1638. From Boston two of his children went south and became founding settlers of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and three of them, with his widow, went north to establish Exeter in the Province of New Hampshire, and then proceeded to Wells, Maine. Because of their involvement in the controversy, his children had a disproportionately large role in the establishment of these new settlements in New England.
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J. Sella Martin John Sella Martin (September 27, 1832 - August 11, 1876) was a noted abolitionist in Boston, Massachusetts and a pastor, who had escaped from slavery in Alabama. He was a leading African-American preacher and activist for equality before the American Civil War, traveling to England to lecture against slavery. When he returned, he preached in Presbyterian churches in Washington, DC.
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Henry Brewster Stanton Henry Brewster Stanton (June 27, 1805 – January 14, 1887) was an American abolitionist, social reformer, attorney, journalist and politician. His writing was published in the "New York Tribune," the "New York Sun," and William Lloyd Garrison's "Anti-Slavery Standard" and "The Liberator". He was elected to the New York State Senate in 1850 and 1851.
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William Apess William Apess (1798–1839, Pequot) (also known as William Apes before 1837), was an ordained Methodist minister, writer, and activist of mixed-race descent, who was a political and religious leader in Massachusetts. After becoming ordained as a Methodist minister in 1829, he published his autobiography the same year. It is among the first autobiographies by a Native American writer. Apess was part Pequot by descent, especially through his mother's family, and identified with their culture.
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Fredrick McGhee Fredrick L. McGhee (October 28, 1861 – September 9, 1912), a black civil rights activist and one of America’s first African American lawyers. McGhee, born as a slave but who later was able to achieve a substantial career as an attorney and become one of the civil rights pioneers, was a contemporary of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.
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Elizabeth Freeman Elizabeth Freeman ( 1744December 28, 1829), also known as Bet or MumBet, was the first black slave to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling, in Freeman's favor, found slavery to be inconsistent with the 1780 Massachusetts State Constitution. Her suit, "Brom and Bett v. Ashley" (1781), was cited in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court appellate review of Quock Walker's freedom suit. When the court upheld Walker's freedom under the state's constitution, the ruling was considered to have implicitly ended slavery in Massachusetts.