*On this date, 1837, the Detroit Anti-Slavery Society was formed. Before the American Civil War, activists in northern cities formed anti-slavery organizations to promote the abolitionist cause. Detroit’s Anti-Slavery Society was founded the same year Michigan became a state. The new state constitution included a ban on slavery. Abolitionists organized to fight the institution of […]
learn more*Helen Appo Cook was born on this date in 1837. She was a wealthy, prominent Black community activist in the women’s club movement. Helen Appo was born to William Appo, a prominent musician, and Elizabeth Brady Appo, who owned a millinery business in New York. Because of William Appo’s music career, the family lived in […]
learn more*Charlotte Grimke was born on this date in 1837. She was a Black abolitionist and poet.
learn more*The birth of Jacob C. White Jr. is celebrated on August 28th 1837. He was a Black educator, intellectual, and abolitionist. Jacob Clement White Jr. was the son of Jacob White Sr. and Elizabeth White. He was raised at 100 Old York Road in Philadelphia’s predominantly white Jenkintown neighborhoods. His father was a barber and physician who […]
learn more*Newton Knight ion was born on this date in 1837. He was a white-American abolitionist, farmer, unionist, and Confederate soldier. Knight was born near the Leaf River in Jones County, Mississippi, a region dominated by virgin longleaf pines, and wolves and panthers roamed the land. Knight married Serena Turner in 1858, and they moved to […]
learn more*This date in 1838 celebrates the opening of the Milton House. It was a stop (station) on the Underground Railroad, a 19th-century network of people and places that aided the freedom of escaped enslaved people in America. Behind the house is the Goodrich Cabin, built in 1837 and brought to the site in 1839; it was […]
learn more*Helen Pitts Douglass’s birth is celebrated on August 16, 1838. She was a white-American teacher and suffragist known as Frederick Douglass’s second wife. Helen Pitts was born in Honeoye, New York; her parents were activists in the abolitionist and suffragist movements. She was also a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Alden, who sailed to America on […]
learn more*Susan Paul Vashon was born in Boston, Massachusetts on this date in 1838. She was an African American teacher and abolitionist.
learn more*Rosetta Douglass-Sprague was born on this date in 1839. She was a Black teacher and activist. She was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Anna Murray-Douglass and Frederick Douglass. When she was five, she moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, with her parents. She was the eldest of five children. Like her father, she was a critical thinker but struggled […]
learn more*The first issue of the National Anti-Slavery Standard was published on June 11, 1840. The Standard was a weekly newspaper published concurrently in New York City and Philadelphia. This was the official weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society; its editors were Lydia Maria Child and David Lee Child. It published essays, debates, speeches, events, […]
learn more*On this date in 1840, The World Anti-Slavery Convention met for the first time at Exeter Hall in London. The new society’s mission was “The universal extinction of slavery and the slave trade and the protection of the rights and interests of the enfranchised population in the British possessions and of all persons captured […]
learn more*The birth of Cudjo Lewis, c 1840, is celebrated on this date. He was a Black Laborer, Historian, and one of the last known African survivors of the Middle Passage, the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States. He was born Oluale Kossola in Benin to Oluale Kossola and his second wife Fondlolu. He […]
learn more*This date in 1840 is celebrated as the birth date of James M. Turner, a Black Reconstruction Era politician, activist, educator, and diplomat. James Milton Turner was born into slavery in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child, he was sold on the steps of the St. Louis US Courthouse for $50 (US$ 1,500 in […]
learn more*William Monroe Trotter was born on this date in 1872. He was an African American news publisher and activist and perhaps the most militant of the known civil rights activist of the 19th century.
learn more*Julia Bullard Nelson was born on this date in 1842. She was a white-American educator and activist for inclusive education and a woman’s right to vote. Born in High Ridge, Connecticut, Bullard moved to Minnesota with her family in 1857. Around 1862, she earned a teaching degree at Hamline University and then relocated to Red […]
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