Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved people around the world.
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the migration of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa. It was modeled on an earlier British colonization in Africa, which had sought to resettle London's "black poor".
David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery.
Henry Highland Garnet was an American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. Having escaped as a child from slavery in Maryland with his family, he grew up in New York City. He was educated at the African Free School and other institutions, and became an advocate of militant abolitionism. He became a minister and based his drive for abolitionism in religion.
James McCune Smith was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.
Theodore Sedgwick Wright (1797–1847), sometimes Theodore Sedgewick Wright, was an African-American abolitionist and minister who was active in New York City, where he led the First Colored Presbyterian Church as its second pastor. He was the first African American to attend Princeton Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1828 or 1829. In 1833 he became a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, an interracial group that included Samuel Cornish, a Black Presbyterian, and many Congregationalists, and served on its executive committee until 1840.
Robert Finley was an American Presbyterian clergyman and educator who is known as one of the founders of the American Colonization Society, which established the colony of Liberia in West Africa as a place for free African Americans.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free, whether of African or mixed descent.
Freedom's Journal was the first African American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. John Wilk and other free Black men in New York City, it was published weekly starting with the March 16, 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal was superseded in 1829 by The Rights of All, published between 1829 and 1830 by Samuel Cornish, the former senior editor of the Journal. The View covered it as part of Black History Month in 2021.
The New-York Manumission Society was an American organization founded in 1785 by U.S. Founding Father John Jay, among others, to promote the gradual abolition of slavery and manumission of slaves of African descent within the state of New York. The organization was made up entirely of white men, most of whom were wealthy and held influential positions in society. Throughout its history, which ended in 1849 after the abolition of slavery in New York, the society battled against the slave trade, and for the eventual emancipation of all the slaves in the state. It founded the African Free School for the poor and orphaned children of slaves and free people of color.
Peter Williams Jr. (1786–1840) was an African-American Episcopal priest, the second ordained in the United States and the first to serve in New York City. He was an abolitionist who also supported free black emigration to Haiti, the black republic that had achieved independence in 1804 in the Caribbean. In the 1820s and 1830s, he strongly opposed the American Colonization Society's efforts to relocate free blacks to the colony of Liberia in West Africa.
During the era of slavery in the United States, the education of enslaved African Americans, except for religious instruction, was discouraged, and eventually made illegal in most of the Southern states. After 1831, the prohibition was extended in some states to free blacks as well. Even if educating Blacks was legal, they still had little access to education, in the North as well as the South.
The Noyes Academy was a racially integrated school, which also admitted women, founded by New England abolitionists in 1835 in Canaan, New Hampshire, near Dartmouth College, whose then-abolitionist president, Nathan Lord, was "the only seated New England college president willing to admit black students to his college".
The importation of enslaved Africans to what became New York began as part of the Dutch slave trade. The Dutch West India Company imported eleven African slaves to New Amsterdam in 1626, with the first slave auction held in New Amsterdam in 1655. With the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, more than 42% of New York City households held slaves by 1703, often as domestic servants and laborers. Others worked as artisans or in shipping and various trades in the city. Slaves were also used in farming on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, as well as the Mohawk Valley region.
Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet was an American educator and suffragist from New York City who was a pioneer and influential African-American female school principal in the New York City public school system.
The Oneida Institute was a short-lived (1827–1843) but highly influential school that was a national leader in the emerging abolitionist movement. It was the most radical school in the country, the first at which black men were just as welcome as whites. "Oneida was the seed of Lane Seminary, Western Reserve College, Oberlin and Knox colleges."
Patrick Henry Reason, first named Patrice Rison, was one of the earliest African-American engravers and lithographers in the United States. He was active as an abolitionist. He was a leader in a fraternal order, gaining recognition for Hamilton Lodge No. 710, New York, as part of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery for non-criminals through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
William Howard Day was a black abolitionist, editor, educator and minister. After his father died when he was four, Day went to live with J. P. Williston and his wife who ensured that he received a good education and learned the printer's trade. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from Oberlin College. He was a printer and newspaper editor. He fought for civil rights of African Americans a number of ways, as a journalist, teacher, and leader of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was an orator, making a speech to 10,000 newly emancipated people on what biographer Todd Mealy called the first march on Washington.
The African Civilization Society (ACS) was an American Black nationalist organization founded by Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany in New York City to serve African Americans. Founded in 1858 in response to the 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford and a series of national events in the 1850s which negatively impacted African Americans, its mission was to exercise Black self-determination by establishing a colony of free people of color in Yorubaland. Additionally, the organization intended the colony to Westernize Africa, combat the Atlantic slave trade, and create a cotton and molasses production economy underwritten by free labor to undermine slavery in the United States and the Caribbean. However, the majority of African Americans remained opposed to emigration programs like theirs.
