Central Pennsylvania's journey from slavery to freedom
Study Areas:
Resources:
Slavery
in
Pennsylvania
Community:
Events (come see us)
Map (Harrisburg anti-slavery tour in Google Maps)
Anti-Slavery,
Abolition
& Agitation
Free
Persons
of Color
Underground
Railroad
The
Violent
Decade
United
States
Colored Troops
Harrisburg's
Civil War
Year
of Jubilee
1863
Info | Begin Reading
News:
Reginald
F. Lewis Museum Family History Fridays. Feb 3 and March 2, 2012.
Click image
<<< at left for more details.
Crossing to Freedom; Buffalo News previews the William Still Story on PBS
News for Harriet Tubman UGRR State Park, Dorchester Co, MD
Couple depict anti-slavery work of 1800s in McConnellsburg church
Historian Judith Wellman on UGRR and Women's Rights in Upstate NY (audio link)
PBS Video: The William Still Story. Link to videos and upcoming PBS specials. Special coming February 6.
Underground Railroad Along the Champlain Canal (New York). Lakes to Locks project.
On
this date in local
African American history...
January events in local African American history (see the whole year)
January 31, 1837: Shakespeare Hall in Harrisburg is the site of a convention to form a state anti-slavery society. Three hundred people attended and the proceedings were reported to The Liberator by correspondent John Greenleaf Whittier.
January 31, 1845: Attempted kidnapping in Harrisburg of African American resident Peter Hawkins by the notorious slave catcher Thomas Finnegan.
February
February 1, 1861: Texas becomes the seventh state to secede from the Union.
February 1. 1865: Illinois becomes the first state to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.
February 2, 1866: President Andrew Johnson meets with a delegation of African Americans, led by Frederick Douglass, who ask him to support the vote for African American men. Johnson refuses to support the idea.
February 3, 1837: The Pennsylvania Antislavery Society is formed in convention at Shakespeare Hall in Harrisburg. Attendees include Dr. F. Julius LeMoyne, Charles C. Burleigh, Jonathan Blanchard, and Benjamin Lundy.
February
3, 1977: The final episode of the televised version of
Alex Haley’s Roots draws the highest ratings ever
to that point.
February 6, 1820: First American freed slaves establish
a colony on the coast of Liberia under the auspices of the American
Colonization Society. The Elizabeth, called the “Mayflower
of Liberia,” departs from New York carrying 86 free African
Americans, bound for Sierra Leone.
February 7, 1926: The first “Negro History Week” to be observed begins. Educator Dr. Carter G. Woodson designates the second week of February as a week for his students to study the accomplishments and history of African Americans.
February 8, 1865: Delegates to The State Equal Rights Convention of Colored People of Pennsylvania meet in Harrisburg to again petition for the restoration of the vote to African American men.
February
8,1915: D.W. Griffith’s motion picture "Birth
of a Nation" is released. Its blatantly racist imagery provokes
the NAACP to boycott the movie and protest its screenings. It is
in response to this movie, however, that African American cinema
begins to appear and flourish.
February 10, 1927: Soprano Leontyne Price is born in Laurel, Mississippi.
Price made her Broadway debut in 1952, and her operatic debut in 1957.
February 12, 1793: Passage of the first Federal Fugitive Slave Act,
intended to replace the legal maze of local, state and pre-existing federal
laws regarding fugitive slaves.
February
12, 1909: The National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) is formed as a means to protect African
American rights in the courts.
February 14. 1818: Abolitionist
Frederick Douglass is born into slavery on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland. Because his actual day
of birth was unknown to him, Douglass adopted February
14th as his birthday.
February
15, 1851: The “Shadrach Rescue” takes place
in Boston. Fred Wilkins, known as “Shadrach,” was seized
by federal officials as a fugitive slave, but the well-known local
man was successfully rescued from the courthouse by a crowd of
fifty African Americans. None of those charged in the rescue was
ever convicted.
February 18, 1688: The “Germantown
Protest” is written. Garret Hendericks,
Derick up de Graeff, Abraham up den Graef and
Francis Daniell Pastorius, four Quakers at Germantown,
Pennsylvania, write a protest against the enslavement
of Africans. Based upon the Golden Rule, it was
delivered to the larger Monthly Meeting, where
it was not acted upon and was largely ignored.
February
18, 1969: Simmering racial unrest flares up in Harrisburg’s
schools. Arson fires and assaults on students caused the John Harris,
William Penn, and Camp Curtin schools to close for a day until
order could be restored. John Harris was closed again due to “open
rebellion,” in the words of school superintendent Glenn Parker,
on February 20.
February 20, 1843: Paxton
Lodge No. 5, an African American Masonic Lodge,
is established in Harrisburg.
February 20, 1895: Death of Frederick Douglass.
February 21, 1965: Malcolm X is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
February 22, 1839: Octavius Valentine Catto is born in Charleston, South Carolina. Catto became a teacher at Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth and was invaluable in raising large numbers of African American troops during the Civil War, including a company of men that he led to Harrisburg in June 1863 to defend the state capital from advancing Confederate troops. A tireless equal rights activist, Catto was murdered on Election Day, October 10, 1871 by opposition party rowdies.
February 22, 1841: Painter Grafton Tyler Brown is born in Harrisburg.
February 22, 1861: Abraham Lincoln stops in Harrisburg on the way to his inauguration in Washington. The President-elect and his entourage arrived by train on Market Street at two o'clock, p.m., to a welcoming committee headed by Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin backed by thousands of Pennsylvania militiamen. The presidential party stayed at the Jones House on Market Square. About four hours later, the President-elect was spirited out of town, under cover of darkness, to a waiting train, for a hair-raising night journey to Washington, to foil an assassination plot.
February 22, 1888: Painter Horace Pippin is born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Pippin is perhaps best known for his painting “John Brown Going to his Hanging.”
February 23, 1869: W.E.B. DuBois is born.
February 24, 1811: Daniel Alexander Payne is born in Charleston, South Carolina to free African American parents Martha and London Payne. Payne attended the Lutheran Seminary at Gettysburg in 1835 and went on to become the sixth bishop of the A.M.E. church. He founded Wilberforce University, becoming the first African American president of a college.
February 24, 1837: An anti-abolition meeting in Susquehanna Township elects trustees to manage the Hailman Schoolhouse in the township. The citizens charge the trustees with allowing the use of the schoolhouse for preaching, "but in no event shall they open the door to lectures on abolitionism, negroism, and amalgamationism."
February 25, 1782: Thirty-year-old Hercules Johnston, “a mulatto,” enlists in the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment, in Carlisle. Johnston is described as “5 Feet 8 inches high, born in Paxtang, Lancaster county, short black curled hair, a blemish on his left eye, yellow complexion, by trade a hammerman."
February 25, 1870: Hiram Revels, first African American in the U. S. Senate, begins his term.
February 26, 1869: Congress approves the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving the vote to African Americans. The amendment must be ratified by the states
The
Year of Jubilee,
by George F. Nagle
Find it at Civil War and More Books and at Midtown Scholar Books
On the web:
The
Lumenarium
The official Blog of the Afrolumens Project
Cumberland
County 150
The Civil War in the Cumberland Valley
Freedom
Lies Just North
People, places and tours of the Underground Railroad in Gettysburg and Adams
County.
John
Brown the Aboliltionist: a Biographer's Blog
Any time you spend reading about John Brown is time well spent.
Mason
and Dixon Line Preservation Partnership
Road trip to locate markers, anyone?
Sugar
Grove, PA
Underground Railroad history website