Frederick Gaertner's Blog – July 2015 Archive (4)

The African Free School was founded on November 2, 1787 to serve New York’s growing population of free people of color, as well as the children of slaves. Founded and supported by the New York Manumission Society, the school opened in a private home on Cliff Street with forty-seven students. Classes focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic, with boys receiving further instruction in cartography and navigation and girls in needlework. - See more at:…

One of the founding fathers of our country, John Jay, founded “The New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves and the Protection of such of them as had been or wanted to be Liberated” or the New York Manumission Society, in 1785. Jay also served as its first president. The Society was made up of some of New York’s most wealthy and influential white citizens, who protested the widespread practice of kidnapping black New Yorkers (both slave and free) and selling them as slaves elsewhere. -…

The Pennsylvania Abolition Society was founded on April 14, 1775 at the Rising Sun Tavern in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the “Society for the Relief for Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage.” Seventeen of the 24 men who attended initial meetings of the Society were Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends, and Thomas Paine and Anthony Benezet were among its founders. Benezet, who was a leading Quaker educator, called the society together two years after he persuaded the…

Guess who were the first people on US soil to denounce slavery? If you read the title you probably know the answer already. That’s right, the Quakers. Since its founding in England during the 1640s, the sect, formally called the Religious Society of Friends, has championed equal rights for women and for religious and racial minorities in both England and the United States. - See more at:…