Peter Williams Jr.
*The birth of Peter Williams Jr. is celebrated on this date in 1786. He was a Black Episcopal priest and abolitionist.
Williams was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of Peter Williams Sr., a Revolutionary War veteran, and his wife, Mary "Molly" Durham, an indentured servant from St. Kitts. After his family moved to New York City, Williams attended the African Free School. In 1796, his father was among the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion) organizers in New York. It developed as an independent Black denomination, the second in the United States after the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Philadelphia.
Williams gradually became active in the Episcopal Church, attending afternoon services at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan with other free Blacks. In 1803, he was tutored by Rev. John Henry Hobart, assistant minister at Trinity. As a young man, Williams began to establish himself as a leader. In 1808, he gave a speech on the first anniversary of the United States' abolition of the international slave trade; his talk was An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Delivered in the African Church in the City of New York, January 1, 1808. His speech was published and was one of the earliest publications by a Black person about abolition.
In 1818, with the blessings of the prominent white Episcopal minister Rev. Thomas Lyell, Williams organized a black Episcopal congregation, St. Philip's African Church. Originally located in Lower Manhattan. Since the early 20th century, it has been in Harlem. He supported free Black emigration to Haiti, the Black republic. 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.
Williams believed that abolitionist societies would rescue freed Africans from the 'evil consequences' of slavery through 'example, the lessons of morality, industry and economy' that would one day create a world where 'all the distinctions between the inalienable rights of Black men, and white' were gone. Williams was ordained as an Episcopal priest on July 10, 1826, the second in the United States and the first in New York. The following year, he helped found the Freedom's Journal, the first Black newspaper in America.
He tutored promising students at the African Free School, including James McCune Smith, whom he aided to go to college and medical school in Scotland at the University of Glasgow. Smith returned to practice in New York as the first African-American doctor to be university-trained. 1833, Williams co-founded the Phoenix Society, a New York City mutual aid society for African Americans. That same year, he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and was one of the Black leaders on the executive board of the interracial group. However, his bishop requested that he resign from the Society. Peter Williams Jr. died in 1840.
