*On this date in 1818, Bridget “Biddy” Mason was born. She was a once illiterate Black slave woman who worked as a nurse/midwife and then walked from Mississippi to California to become a successful entrepreneur and a generous contributor to social causes.
learn more*James Wormley was born on this date in 1819. He was a Black businessman. James Wormley was born a free Black citizen in 1819 in Washington. He and his siblings believed they were of Native American descent. Wormley started driving a carriage for his father, Lynch Wormley, who owned a livery near the Willard Hotel. […]
learn more*The birth of Benjamin Montgomery is celebrated on this date in 1819. He was a Black inventor. Born a slave in Loudon, Virginia, Montgomery was “purchased” by Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy and the South’s commander and Chief in the American Civil War, when he was 18. After purchasing his new slave, Davis […]
learn more*George T. Downing was born on this date in 1819. He was a Black abolitionist and businessman. George Thomas Downing was born in New York City to Thomas Downing and Rebecca (West). His father, Thomas, was born in Chincoteague, Virginia, to parents freed from slavery when their master, John Downing, a prominent planter, converted to Methodism. The […]
learn more*The birth of Philip Reed is celebrated on this date, c. 1820. He was a Black master craftsman. He was born into slavery in South Carolina’s historic city of Charleston. Also known as Philip Reid, he worked at the foundries of self-taught sculptor Clark Mills. He was emancipated on April 16, 1862, under the […]
learn more*Augustus Washington’s birth in 1820 is celebrated on this date. He was an African American abolitionist and photographer specializing as a Daguerreotypist.
learn more*The birth of Nearest Green c.1820 is celebrated on this date. He was a Black master distiller of alcohol. Nathan “Nearest” Green was a Black slave owned by a business known as Landis & Green, who hired him out to Dan Call for a fee. Dan Call was a preacher, grocer, slave owner, and distiller. In the 1850s, Jack Daniel […]
learn more*On this date in 1821, we celebrate the Genius of Universal Emancipation newspaper. This abolitionist newspaper from Baltimore, Maryland, was established by Benjamin Lundy. Originally, the Manumission Intelligencer became The Emancipator in 1820. 1821 Lundy bought the paper and renamed it Genius of Universal Emancipation from 1821 to 1839 under Lundy’s editorship and Elihu Embree. Lundy’s contributions reflected his Quaker views, condemning slavery on moral and religious grounds but […]
learn moreThe birth of Louis Charles Roudanez in 1823 is celebrated on this date. He was a Black Creole of color physician, civic leader, and news publisher.
learn more*Sylvanus B. Lowry was born on this date in 1824. He was a white-American 19th-century political boss, slave owner, newspaper publisher, and pioneer. Born in Princeton, Kentucky, Lowry’s father was David Lowry, a Scottish-American Cumberland Presbyterian minister and missionary to the Winnebago people in northeast Iowa. In 1847, the Lowry family followed the Winnebago as […]
learn more*J. R. Winters was born on this date in 1824. He was a Black lyricist, abolitionist, and inventor Joseph Richard Winters was born in Leesburg, Virginia, to an African brickmaker and a Shawnee Indian mother, the daughter of an herbalist and medical practitioner called the “Indian doctor woman.” The family relocated to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, around […]
learn more*Paul Trévigne Jr. was born on this date in 1825. He was a Black Creole newspaperman and civil rights activist. From New Orleans, Louisiana, he was the biracial son of Paul Trevigne, a veteran of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, and Josephine Marguerite Decoudreaux. Free men of color had served in the militia under French rule […]
learn more*The birth of James P. Ball in 1825 is celebrated on this date. He was a Black Abolitionist, free Black man, photographer and businessman.
learn more*Nathaniel Gordon was born on this date in 1826. He was a white-American slave trader. He was born in Portland, Maine. He went into shipping and eventually owned his ship, Erie. On August 7, 1860, he loaded 897 slaves aboard his ship Erie at Sharks Point, Congo River, Angola, West Africa, “of whom only […]
learn more*On this date in c.1826, Judy W. Reed’s birth is celebrated. She was a Black inventor during the 1880s. Little is known about Judy Woodford Reed or Reid. She first appears in the 1870 Federal Census as a 44-year-old seamstress in Fredericksviile Parish near Charlottesville, Virginia, in Albemarle County, along with her husband Allen, a […]
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