The first meeting of an antislavery society in the United States was held in a Philadelphia tavern in 1775 and was recently commemorated at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, writes Elizabeth Wellington for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Quakers Israel Pemberton Jr. and Thomas Harrison filed a lawsuit against the slave trader who transported Dinah Nevil. Nevil was a multiracial woman of Indigenous, Black, and European heritage, who along with her four children, got shipped to Philadelphia with the intent of selling them in the Deep South. Their goal was to establish that selling Black people into slavery on free soil was illegal, not only in Pennsylvania but throughout all of the colonies.
On April 14, 1775, Quaker leaders and educators Anthony Benezet and John Woolman met with a group of mostly Quaker men at the Rising Sun Tavern to discuss potential legal strategies on how to make that happen. The group called themselves the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.
The group’s advocacy resulted in the 1780 Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act, marking the first law to abolish slavery in America. In 1784, the original society was revived as the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society.
Read more about the beginnings of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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