Study Areas:
Significant
Events in Local African American History
Month by Month
January February March April May June July
August September October November December
January
January 1, 1826: African American preacher Jarena Lee preaches at the Methodist Episcopal Church on the southeast corner of Second and South streets in Harrisburg. While in town, she stayed with a Mr. Williams.
January 1, 1831: William Lloyd Garrison publishes his first issue of The Liberator.
January 1 1836: American Anti-Slavery Society lecturer Samuel L. Gould speaks at the Wesley Church in Judystown, an African American neighborhood of Harrisburg, addressing a mostly African American audience. His series of anti-slavery speeches inflames the local town council, which, fearing he is "exciting the colored population of this borough," issues an official resolution calling for him to "desist from his efforts."
January
1, 1863: The Emancipation Proclamation is issued. (text
here)
January 3, 1816: Stephen Smith becomes a free man as
he buys his freedom from Thomas Boude of Columbia with fifty dollars
borrowed from
a friend. He
would rise to become a leader in his community and church, an Underground
Railroad activist, and the wealthiest African American businessman
in America during his time.
January 7, 1891: Novelist and dramatist Zora Neale Hurston is born in
Eatonville, Florida.
January 9, 1861: Mississippi becomes the second state to secede
from the Union.
January 9, 1866: The first classes are held at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee. This historic African American college is named for General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedman’s Bureau. Graduates include W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin.
January 10, 1861: Florida becomes the third state to secede from the Union.
January
11, 1861: Alabama becomes the fourth state to secede from
the Union.
January 13, 1863: Federal officials formally authorize
the raising of African American troops for the South Carolina Volunteer
Infantry.
January 14, 1836: Harrisburg Anti-Slavery Society is formed. Its president is Rev. Nathan Stem, of the Episcopal Church. Vice-presidents are William W. Rutherford and Mordecai McKinney. Other notable members are Alexander Graydon and Rev. John Winebrenner.
January 15, 1863: Harrisburg’s leading African American residents meet in the Bethel A.M.E. Church to form a response to the Emancipation Proclamation. Hailing a “new era in our country’s history,” they pledge to take up arms alongside white soldiers “if called upon.”
January 15, 1929: Civil rights leader and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr. is born in Atlanta, Georgia.
January
16, 1838: First statewide meeting of the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society
opens in Harrisburg’s Shakespeare Hall, a year after its founding
in the same place. The three days of meetings are attended
by Charles C. Rawn.
January 18, 1856: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams is born in Hollidaysburg,
Pennsylvania. Dr. Williams performed the first open heart
surgery in 1893 when
he sutured a knife wound to the pericardium of a stabbing
victim.
January
19, 1861: Georgia becomes the fifth state to secede from
the Union.
January 20, 1838: At the state Constitutional Convention
in Harrisburg, delegates voted 77 to 45 to restrict the vote in Pennsylvania
to “white freemen.” African
American men would not regain the right to vote in Pennsylvania
until passage of the 15th Amendment, in 1870.
January 25, 1972: Shirley Chisholm announces
her candidacy for the presidency of the U.S.
January
26, 1861: Louisiana becomes the sixth state to secede from
the Union.
January 27, 1800: A public slave auction
is held in Lower Paxton Township, at the home of tanner
Jacob Awl, to sell slaves
Peter and Grace,
as well
as other possessions.
January 28, 1838: Anti-slavery activist William H. Burleigh speaks in Harrisburg. Burleigh had attended a lecture by Dr. Booth of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, held at a local church on the same day, and in a letter to The Liberator, denounced Booth as a "pro-slavery man" promoting colonization.
January
29, 1861: Kansas is admitted to the Union as a free state.
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 1, 1902: Langston Hughes, poet and writer, is born in Joplin, Missouri.
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. 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.
March
March 2, 1867: Congress passes the Reconstruction Act
March 3, 1865: The Freedman’s Bureau is established by Congress to provide assistance to freed slaves.
March 4, 1837: An anti-abolition meeting is held at the Unitarian Church to elect delegates to the May 1837 state Integrity of the Union Convention, at the Dauphin County Courthouse.
March 5. 1770: The infamous Boston Massacre occurs. The first person to be killed by British troops is Crispus Attucks, a 47 year-old seaman living in Boston. Attucks had escaped from slavery in Framingham twenty years before his martyrdom.
March 6, 1857: Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivers the Supreme Court decision against Dred Scott, a slave seeking his freedom, and declaring that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories of the United States. Writing for the majority decision, Justice Taney wrote that African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."
March
7, 1756: The slave of Andrew Lycan, of Wiconisco, helps defend
the farm from an attack by hostile Native American raiders.
The un-named
slave
was then entrusted to evacuate the wounded to safety in
Hanover Township when the attack threatened to overwhelm the defenders.
March 9, 1820: The Elizabeth, or the “Mayflower of Liberia,” arrives
in Sierra Leone carrying 86 free African Americans who
will begin a colony on the coast of Liberia under the auspices of the
American Colonization
Society.
March 10, 1858: John Brown meets with Henry Highland Garnet, William Still, and other African American leaders at the Philadelphia home of Stephen Smith.
March
10, 1913: Harriet Tubman dies.
March 20, 1852: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
is published in Boston with great fanfare. It had previously
been serialized in the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper, but huge
public demand
led to its appearance in book form. The first edition
of five thousand copies sold out in two days.
March 26, 1726: “An Act for the Better Regulation of Negroes in
this Province,” is passed in Philadelphia. Designed to calm white
fear of a growing African population, the law was a fully defined set
of Black
Codes that prohibited blacks from drinking, marrying
whites, loitering, hiring out their own time, sheltering other Blacks,
congregating in groups
larger than four persons, carrying weapons, and traveling
without a pass. Penalties included a return to enslavement.
March 30, 1870: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution
is ratified, protecting the right to vote for African
Americans.
April
April 1, 1837: Edward Prigg is indicted in York for the kidnapping of Margaret Morgan and her children in violation of the 1826 Pennsylvania Personal Liberty Law. This sets in motion a trial and appeal that ends up as the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Prigg vs Pennsylvania.
April 1, 1878: Dinah, former slave of the Cowden family, dies at about ninety years of age. She is buried in Paxton Presbyterian Church Cemetery.
April
2, 1845: A delegation of American Antislavery Society speakers, including
Abby Kelley (later Abby Kelly Foster) and Jane Elizabeth
Hitchcock, speak
at the Courthouse in Harrisburg. A Philadelphia correspondent
reports that they lectured to large audiences, "many of whom were
ladies." Unfortunately
the lectures were marred by pro-slavery activists who "raised
false alarms of fire," heckled the speakers, and showered
the group with eggs. The women were also threatened with tar
and feathers, and duckings.
The speakers also spoke at local black churches, where they were
unmolested by rowdies.
April
4. 1792: Thaddeus Stevens, named for the Polish patriot Thaddeus
Kosciuszko, is born in Danville, Vermont to Joshua and Sarah
Morrill Stevens.
April 4, 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, at the Lorraine Hotel while in town to lead a demonstration of striking sanitation workers against low wages and poor working conditions.
April 5, 1800: Eanus, the slave of Robert Clark, of Southampton Township, Cumberland County, is arrested for trying to protect his young son from being taken away by a new owner, Jesse Kilgore, of Newton Township. Eanus leveled a gun at Kilgore when the man tied up Eanus’ son, but Eanus was convinced to put the weapon down and surrender.
April 5, 1839: Robert Smalls, the only African American naval captain to serve during the Civil War, is born in Beaufort, S.C.
April
5, 1856: Booker Taliaferro Washington, first principal
of Tuskegee Institute, is born in Franklin County, Virginia.
April
7, 1712: The New York slave insurrection involved twenty-three
slaves who burned a slaveholder’s house, fought
with authorities, and killed nine whites. Twenty-one
of the rebels were executed, but the event shocked
slaveholders across the colonies. Pennsylvania promptly
imposed higher tariffs on the purchase of slaves in a
temporarily successful measure
to curb slave importation.
April 9, 1865: The forces of Robert E. Lee, commanding
the Army of Northern Virginia, surrender to General Ullysses S. Grant
at the village of Appomatox Court House, Virginia. The surrender, which
was finalized with a ceremony on April 12, effectively ended the war
in Virginia.
April
9, 1866: Congress overrides a veto by President Johnson
and passes the Civil Rights Act, guaranteeing citizenship
and
equal rights
for African
Americans.
April
12, 1787: Richard Allen and Absalom Jones form the Free
African Society in Philadelphia.
April 12, 1861: The American Civil War begins with the shelling of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, by Confederate batteries. The bombardment began at four-thirty a.m. and continued for thirty-four hours. The Union garrison surrendered on Saturday, April 13, 1861.
April
12, 1865: The Army of Northern Virginia officially disbands
and over 28,000 Confederate soldiers stacked their arms at Appomattox
Court
House, Virginia, and returned home, marking the end of the war
in Virginia.
April
14, 1800: Caesar, the slave of John McAllister of Tyrone
Township, Cumberland County (modern day Perry County),
is beaten to death
by William McAllister,
John’s brother, for the supposed crime of
stealing some money. Both men are later tried and
found guilty
of murder by a county court.
April 14, 1851: The Franklin family is arrested in Harrisburg, including a small child born in Pennsylvania. Slave Commissioner Richard McAllister tries to suppress protests by holding the hearing in the pre-dawn hours, but word gets out. The family is sent south without the youngest child, who is placed with a local black family.
April 14, 1865: President Abraham Lincoln is shot at Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth.
April 15, 1865: At 7:22 a.m., Abraham Lincoln dies from the wound received at Ford's Theater from assassin John Wilkes Booth.
April 15, 1947: Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to play professional baseball in the major leagues when he appears at Ebbets Field with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
April 16, 1862: President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia.
April 16, 1863: The Harrisburg Daily Telegraph reports on a fugitive slave who was being lawfully taken through the city back to slavery in Maryland.
April
17,
1861: Virginia becomes the eighth state to secede from
the Union.
April
21, 1825: Harrisburg's first reported incident
in which local Blacks come to the aid of
a captured fugitive
slave with
the use of public
demonstration and force in an unsuccessful
rescue attempt.
April 21, 1865: Abraham Lincoln's funeral train brings his body to Harrisburg, arriving about 8:30 p.m. At Market and Fifth streets, his body was transferred to a hearse hitched to four white horses. Grooms led the horses west on Market Street to the Square, turned north to travel along Second Street to State, where the funeral procession turned right to proceed to the Capitol. From 9:30 p.m. until midnight, Harrisburg citizens filied through the House Chamber of the Capitol to view his body in the open casket.
April 22, 1865: At 7 a.m., mourners began viewing Abraham Lincoln's body in the House Chamber of the Capitol at Harrisburg. At 9 a.m., the casket was closed and prepared for the funeral procession back to the waiting funeral train at the Market Street station. More than forty thousand people lined the route along State, Second and Market streets. Ordinary citizen mourners were allowed to join the funeral procession at the end, with African American citizens segregated to the very rear. The train pulled out of Harrisburg at 11 a.m.
April
25, 1821: Harrisburg borough passes an ordinance
requiring all “free
persons of color” to register with
the town burgess and report their names,
occupations,
addresses and the names of all family
members and other non-whites in their
homes. They had
to notify the authorities
if they moved to another residence in
town, and if anyone moved in with them.
This ordinance
was an attempt to control non-whites
who were not
already under the rigid controls of slavery
and indentured servitude.
April
28, 1847: George B. Vashon, son of John Bethune
Vashon, a political activist and Underground
Railroad conductor
of
Carlisle and
Pittsburgh, become
the first African American to pass the
New York State Bar.
April 29. 1824: Birthday of George Boyer Vashon, abolitionist, lawyer and educator. Born in Carlisle to abolitionist and rights activist John Vashon, George was the first African American graduate of Oberlin College. He studied law and was later president of Avery College in Pittsburgh. He would go on to help found Howard University.
April 29, 1852: A. D. Ridgely, a police officer from Baltimore, Maryland, shoots to death William Smith, an alleged fugitive slave working at a lumberyard in Columbia, PA. Ridgely was accompanied by Solomon Snyder of Harrisburg, a deputy to Federal Slave Commissioner Richard McAllister in Harrisburg. The incident causes outrage in the north.
May
May 1, 1837: The Friends of the Union Convention, also called the Integrity of the Union State Convention, opened at the Dauphin County Courthouse with about one hundred delegates. The purpose of the state convention appears to have been to ease the fears of slaveholders in the Southern states regarding the purpose and beliefs of Pennsylvania’s citizens.
May
2, 1837: Anti-slavery activist Thaddeus Stevens attends the statewide
anti-abolition Integrity of the Union Convention in Harrisburg with
the intent to disrupt and mock the proceedings, which he does.
May
6, 1861: The Confederacy formally recognizes that a state
of war exists with the United States of America. Arkansas becomes the
ninth state to secede from the Union to join the Confederacy.
May
7, 1878: African American inventor Joseph Winters patents the wagon mounted
fire escape ladder for the fire department of Chambersburg,
Pennsylvania,
significantly enhancing the ability of firefighters to rapidly
reach people in tall buildings.
May
9, 1800: John Brown is born at Torrington, Connecticut, the son
of Owen and Ruth Mills Brown.
May
9, 1846: New England Abolitionist Charles T. Torrey dies
in the Maryland Penitentiary of tuberculosis, just hours before a
pardon from Maryland Governor Thomas G. Pratt reached the prison
warden. In December 1844, Torrey had been convicted in Baltimore of
aiding the slaves of Bushrod Taylor of Virginia and the slaves of
William Heckrotte, of Baltimore, escape into Pennsylvania.
May
11, 1834: Thomas Morris Chester is born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
the fourth child of George and Marie Chester.
May
14, 1838: Pennsylvania Hall opens in Philadelphia as a grand
auditorium for anti-slavery and other social reform groups.
It would be burned
by a mob three days later.
May
17, 1838: Pennsylvania Hall, built by the Philadelphia Female
Anti-Slavery Society as a meeting place for abolitionists,
is burned by a mob
incensed about whites and blacks meeting together at a female
anti-slavery convention
being held there.
May 17, 1954: U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education declares that the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education is unconstitutional, setting the stage for the desegregation of American schools.
May 18, 1896: U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessey vs. Ferguson establishes the doctrine of “separate but equal” public facilities for African Americans.
May 19, 1925: Malcolm X is born in Omaha, Nebraska.
May
20, 1861: North Carolina secedes, becoming the tenth state
to join the Confederacy.
May
24, 1852: James Phillips, a longtime Harrisburg resident,
is remanded south by U.S. Slave Commissioner Richard
McAllister, causing an
uproar not only in Harrisburg's African American community,
but with local
whites as well. Attorney Charles C. Rawn is dispatched
to Richmond
with $800
to buy Phillips' freedom.
May
26, 1926: Jazz musician Miles Davis is born in St. Louis,
Missouri.
May
28, 1866: William Justin Carter is born at Richmond, Virginia.
A successful and prominent African American attorney
in Harrisburg, W. Justin Carter
was denied admission to the Dauphin County Bar on June
10, 1904 because
of his race. Ninety-seven years later the Dauphin County
Bar voted to admit him posthumously to correct an “egregious
mistake.”
May
31, 1921: Beginning of a two-day race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma
that kills eighty-one people.
June
June 2, 1847: A riot in Carlisle over the seizure of three African Americans as fugitive slaves becomes known as the McClintock Slave Riot due to the involvement of Dickinson College professor John McClintock. McClintock was acquitted of charges that he incited the riot.
June
8,
1861: Tennessee secedes, becoming the eleventh and final
state to leave the Union and join the Confederacy.
June
12, 1854: Three men from Maryland, accompanied by a Philadelphia
marshal, arrived in Harrisburg in search of a fugitive who was
working in a brickyard
in town. With Commissioner McAllister gone, the slaveholders had
been forced to go first to Commissioner Edward D. Ingraham in Philadelphia,
to swear out a warrant. The delay gave Harrisburg activists the
time they needed to spirit the man out of town before he could be
located
by the slave catchers.
June
14, 1811: Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
is born in Litchfield, Connecticut.
June 15, 1863: With invading Confederate troops reported in Chambersburg, Department of the Susquehanna commander Major General Darius Couch appeals to Harrisburg's citizens to dig entrenchments on a bluff across the Susquehanna River, in present day Lemoyne. Although his appeal was not explicit regarding race, it was addressed to the citys' white citizenry. By five p.m., hundreds of Harrisburg's white citizens assembled at the Camel Back Bridge, shovels in hand, ready to cross to the West Shore to begin digging.
June 15, 1864: Congress authorizes equal pay and equipment for African American troops.
June
16, 1863: Harrisburg finally realizes it needs to involve
its African American residents in its defense. Facing flagging support
and effort from his white citizen-laborers, Fortifications Superintendant
William T. Hildrup places the following advertisement in the morning
edition of the Patriot and Union: "TO THE COLORED MEN
OF HARRISBURG. We want men of muscle, and men who are ready and willing
to work on our entrenchments.—We have such white men already.
But colored men can help in this common cause also, and colored men
are needed at this crisis.—Liberal inducements are offered
to such of those as assist us, and their pay will $1.25 per day as
long as they work. The night laborers will receive the same compensation.—Turn
out then men of all classes and colors, if for nothing more, to the
assistance of your country, and the capital of the old Keystone State."
June 17, 1863: The triennial convention of the Democratic
Party of Pennsylvania began in the Capitol's House of Representatives
chamber, for the purpose of nominating a candidate for Governor,
and one for
Judge
of the Supreme Court. Dr. George W. Nebinger, a representative delegate
from Philadelphia, was elected to preside over the convention. After
some organizing work, the assembled delegates began to work on resolutions
pledging fidelity to the Constitution and the Union. Some historians
surmise that General Darius Couch's refusal to enlist a company of
African American men the day before was to avoid agitating the assembled
Democrats.
June 17, 1863: At 9 pm, a company of African American men under the command of Captain William Babe arrived at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot on Market Street in Harrisburg. These were young men from Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, recruited and drilled by Octavius Valentine Catto, a mathematics teacher and administrator at the Institute, to defend the state capital from Confederate attack. Captain Babe reported to Department of the Susquehanna commander General Darius Couch, who refused to muster in the ninety black men and their three white officers, saying he had "no authority" to accept African American troops. The young men returned, demoralized and angry, to the train station, to board the 2 am train back to Philadelphia.
June 18, 1863: Stung by the rejection by Harrisburg military authorities of Philadelphia African American volunteers to defend Harrisburg from attack, fiery abolitionist George Luther Stearns went directly to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Stearns telegraphed "A special dispatch to the Philadelphia North American states that General Couch declined to receive colored troops, alleging that he has no authority to receive such troops for less than three years. Two companies here are ready to go for the emergency. Shall I forward them? Companies from other points can be forwarded. Shall they be sent?" Before noon, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sent two telegraphic replies: one to Couch in Harrisburg and one to Stearns in Philadelphia. To Couch he wired a simple directive: “You are authorized to receive into the service any volunteer troops that may be offered, without regard to color.” To the angry Stearns, Stanton sent a more ambiguous message, telling him that color would no longer be an issue in Harrisburg, but “if there is likely to be any dispute about the matter, it will be better to send no more. It is well to avoid all controversy in the present juncture, as the troops can be well used elsewhere.”
June 19, 1862: Juneteenth, African American Emancipation Day. President Abraham Lincoln signs into law a measure prohibiting slavery in the territories of the United States.
June
22, 1863: Harrisburg commander General Darius Couch
sends a dispatch to his advance forces in Chambersburg, under Brigadier
General
Joseph
F.
Knipe,
alerting
the commander that “fifty rebel cavalry were stealing horses
near Maria Furnace, Caledonia Springs, and Millerstown.” Most
of the residents of the nearby settlement of Little Africa, African
American workers at Thaddus Stevens' Caledonia Forge, had probably
already fled toward Harrisburg.
June
22, 1937: Joe Louis knocks out Jim J. Braddock in the eighth
round to win the Heavyweight Champion of the World boxing title.
June 22, 1938: Exactly one year after defeating Braddock, Louis defeats Max Schmeling, the only boxer who had ever bested him, knocking out the poster boy of Nazi Aryan supremacy.
June 23, 1969: Harrisburg experienced its worst modern race riot triggered by an incident during a boycott by local African Americans of a pharmacy at 13th and Market Streets. Police used tear gas to disperse large groups of rioters and made seven arrests.
June 24, 1969: A second day of racial unrest in Harrisburg results in the death by police gunfire of Charles A. Scott. Violence continued with crowds setting fires, and police made three arrests.
June 25, 1863: After a week of relative calm, Harrisburg is again flooded with African American refugees fleeing advancing Confederate forces. In Harrisburg, a jaded correspondent for the New York Herald wrote “Vast numbers of ebony colored children are daily arriving in the city—some destitute, others again more fortunate. Their rendezvous is in a section of the city denominated ‘Smoky Hollow.’ I have not visited it, and therefore can give you no idea of the scenes being enacted there.” Many of the refugees took shelter in Judy's Town, near Third and Mulberry streets, or crossed over the Market Street canal bridge and camped in the open meadows of Allison's Hollow, east of the city.
June 25, 1863 (evening): At a hastily arranged "War Meeting" in the Tanners' Alley Masonic Hall, Harrisburg's African American residents organized a small company of men to volunteer for the defense of Harrisburg and the Commonwealth. It consisted of fifty-four men, captained by local barber and anti-slavery activist Henry Bradley. In contrast to the events of a week earlier, when General Couch refused to enlist the African American troops from Philadlephia, this time there was no such rejection. The first African American troops to be enlisted in the defense of the Pennsylvania state capital were from Harrisburg.
June 26, 1863: A second Harrisburg company of African American men is mustered in, this one captained by Thomas Morris Chester. Although they were issued uniforms and equipment, the state refused to supply muskets or other armaments to the new black troops. Chester's men joined Bradley's men in drill practice in the streets of Harrisburg. Meanwhile, Confederate troops had now reached Gettysburg.
June 27, 1863: Expecting an imminent attack, General Darius Couch orders all school buildings in Harrisburg to be cleared out so that they could be utilized as makeshift military hospitals. African American schoolteacher John Wolf saw his Cherry Street schoolhouse, along with all the other city schoolhouses, taken over by military authorities and outfitted for the expected treatment of wounded and dying soldiers. Couch also ordered that all city churches be prepared for the same fate if the numbers of wounded should require it. With the potential military occupation of Wesley Union and Bethel A.M.E, the city suddenly had no more protected areas for African American refugees.
June
28, 1863: The town of Mechanicsburg surrenders to invading
Confederate troops. Town burgess George Hummel is made a prisoner
and taken to General Albert G. Jenkins for questioning. Residents
are forced to supply the occupying enemy cavalrymen with 1500 rations
and ample forage for their horses. About mid-day, an artillery duel
develops between Jenkins' artillerists stationed at Peace Church,
and the Philadelphia Home Guard Artillery, sitting at Oyster Point.
The cannon-fire is easily heard in Harrisburg, where residents believed
the battle for Harrisburg was beginning. African American refugees
camped along the riverfront moved to safer grounds further inside
the city. Military authorities
finally relent, and issue weapons to the two companies of African American
troops in Harrisburg.
June
28, 1863: A company of African American militia is used
in the defense of Wrightsville, York County, against Confederate
soldiers
advancing
to the river intending to cross the bridge into
Columbia. Although the meager defense was futile against the
seasoned Southern
veterans, Union
commanders praised the delaying efforts of the
African American troops who “stood
up to their work bravely,” after working all day
to dig the defensive trenches. One of the African American
soldiers was killed by a Southern artillery round.
June 29, 1863: Confederate General Albert G. Jenkins reconnoiters through Shiremanstown to Slate Hill and eastward, to a vantage point on Lisburn Road, from where he is able to see and study the defenses of Harrisburg. He sends his report to General Ewell, in Carlisle, who reviews it early that afternoon and subsequently orders General Robert E. Rodes to attack and capture Harrisburg with his division on Tuesday the thirtieth. Just hours later, however, with news of a rapidly advancing Union army, Robert E. Lee would pull his troops back from the gates of Harrisburg, to concentrate in Gettysburg.
June 30, 1863: At 10 am, Union troops push forward from their fortified positions on Hummel Hill and encounter rear-guard troops of Jenkins' Sixteenth Virginia Cavalry near Sporting Hill. A skirmish develops into a full-scale battle, eventually involving support fire from Union and Confederate artillery. The Confederates withdrew toward Carlisle, leaving sixteen dead to be buried in the fields around Sporting Hill.
July
July 2, 1777: Vermont becomes the first state to abolish slavery when it outlaws it in its state constitution.
July
2, 1908: Thurgood Marshall, first African
American appointed to the Supreme Court, is born in Baltimore.
July
4, 1836: Plans for the organization of an Adams County Antislavery
Society are laid at an Independence Day picnic at McAllister’s
Mill.
July
9, 1893: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams sutures a wound to the pericardium
of a stabbing victim, applying stringent antiseptic and sterilization
measures, and becomes the first surgeon to perform successful open
heart surgery.
July
11, 1905: The Niagara Movement is founded by W.E.B. DuBois to demand
full equal rights for African Americans. This group was formed
to oppose the views of Booker T. Washington, who advocated patience
on the part
of African Americans in waiting for civil rights. Among the founders
of the Niagara Movement was Harrisburg attorney William Justin
Carter,
Sr.
July
13, 1863: Anti-draft rioters kill hundreds of African Americans
in four days of violence in New York City.
July
20, 1847: A number of Harrisburg’s African American residents
meet in Wesley Union Church “to take into consideration the propriety
of inviting W. L. Garrison and F. Douglass to pay them a visit
on their route to the West.” Edward Bennett, Thomas Early, and
John F. Williams are appointed to draft a resolution inviting the abolitionists
to visit
Harrisburg.
July
22, 1780: The first central Pennsylvania slave registrations,
required by the 1780 Gradual Abolition Law, are recorded in Lancaster
when
store keeper Christopher Crawford, who lived in town, registered
his “Negro
male” Bill, aged ten years and six months, and his “Negro
female” Esther, aged nineteen years and six months, with
county Clerk of the Peace John Hubley.
July
24, 1845: Slave catcher Thomas Finnegan and his gang kidnap
Kitty Payne and her three children from a home in Bendersville, Adams
County. Finnegan
was eventually captured, tried for kidnapping in November 1846,
found guilty and sentenced to five years in Eastern Penitentiary.
July 25, 1847: Liberia declares its independence.
July 25, 1918: Beginning of four days of race riots in Chester, PA that leave five people dead.
July 26, 1918: Beginning of four days of race riots in Philadelphia, PA that leave four people dead.
July
26, 1948: President Harry S Truman issues
executive
orders that institute fair hiring practices in the civilian
government and wipe out segregation in the armed forces.
July
28, 1868: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is
finally ratified, two years after its passage, guaranteeing citizenship
and protection
of rights to African Americans. The delay was caused by
the refusal of Southern states to ratify the amendment.
July
30, 1852: James Phillips returns to Harrisburg with attorney
Charles C. Rawn, who successfully bargained for his release
in Richmond
after ten weeks in a slave prison. They arrived late at
night to a “tumultuous
welcome” from Harrisburg’s African American
community, which met the men at the train station. After
a joyous reunion with his wife
and children, the crowd put the Phillips family in a small
wagon and staged an impromptu welcome home parade through
town.
August
August 1, 1834: The British Parliament decrees an end to African American slavery in the West Indies. This “Emancipation Day” was celebrated in many African American communities in the United States, including Carlisle and Harrisburg, until the mid-1860s.
August
2, 1925: Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is organized, with A. Philip
Randolph elected president.
August
6, 1862: The editor of Harrisburg’s Patriot
and Union newspaper
was arrested by military authorities on charges that he published
an article discouraging enlistments. The article, which was later proved
to be a prank, stated that two regiments of African American troops
were
to be raised in the city, and that rations, pay and bounty would
be the same as received by white troops.
August 7, 1847: William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass stop as invited guests in Harrisburg on their trip to Ohio. Garrison stayed with Dr. William W. Rutherford, while Douglass stayed with African American schoolteacher John Wolf. Their evening lecture at the Courthouse was violently disrupted by anti-abolition rowdies. Garrison was hit by rotten eggs and Douglass was hit by stones and bricks.
August
8, 1847: William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass lectured twice
at the Wesley Union A.M.E. Zion church, in Tanners’ Alley. They
spoke in the late morning and in the afternoon, to a crowded
audience that was mostly African American, although in a letter written
several
days later from Pittsburgh, Garrison recalled that “a
number of white [friends] were also present.”
August
11, 1850: Charles Lenox Remond lectures in Harrisburg. He
and his sister, Sarah Parker Remond, were the first traveling African
American
lecturers
with the American Antislavery Society.
August 12, 1868: Death of Thaddeus Stevens, staunch advocate of free public education, African American civil rights, and proponent of radical reconstruction in the South.
August 15, 1840: Birth of Harriet McClintock Marshall, legendary Harrisburg Underground Railroad worker. She married escaped slave Elisha Marshall in Wesley Union church in June 1864.
August 16, 1834: On a Saturday night, a campaign of violence and vandalism against the homes of African American residents in Columbia, Lancaster County, began. It would culminate with a full-scale riot by a white mob in the town's African American neighborhood four days later.
August 16, 1838: American Anti-slavery Society agent Daniel Alexander Payne undertakes a speaking circuit through Pennsylvania, beginning in Philadelphia, where he meets with James Forten, Charles W. Gardiner, and Robert Purvis, among others.
August
19, 1834: After nightfall on Tuesday evening, August 19,
1834, a mob of about fifity wihte boys and men rioted in Columbia's
African American neighborhood, terrifying the residents by stoning
their houses, breaking windows, and firing guns. The demonstration
lasted until 1 a.m.
August
20, 1859: John Brown meets Frederick Douglass in an abandoned
stone quarry in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in a
last attempt to convince
Douglass
to join his raid on Harpers Ferry. Douglass, believing
the plan would hinder the cause of abolition, declines
to be
included.
August 21, 1619: Twenty African slaves are brought to the settlement of Jamestown in the colony of Virginia, marking the beginning of slavery in British North America.
August 21, 1829: Wesley Church is founded in Harrisburg. Organized by a group of local African American residents, it began holding services in a small log building at Third and Mulberry Streets, in the Judystown neighborhood. Its first pastor was Rev. David Stevens.
August 22, 1831: Nat Turner begins his rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. Turner’s group killed 55 whites before being scattered by militia. In the violent aftermath, more than 200 slaves and free Blacks would be killed in retribution.
August
23, 1845: In Lancaster, William Dorsey is remanded south
to slavery by Judge Lewis. Dorsey had for several years been a employee
at one of the iron furnaces owned by Clement B. Grubb, and had married
in Lancaster County. Upon hearing of the court's ruling, Clement
Grubb purchased Dorsey's freedom for $600.
August
24, 1850: Harrisburg experiences its most significant
fugitive slave related violence as a large crowd
of local African
American residents
threatens some Virginia slave catchers who were
attempting to subdue resistant fugitives in an
anteroom of the
county prison.
Harrisburg
resident Joseph Pople attacked the Virginians,
allowing one of the fugitives to escape with
the help of the
crowd. Judge
John
J. Pearson
ordered the
immediate arrest of the slave catchers and the
two remaining slaves and issued warrants for
the arrest
of nine local
Blacks on charges
of creating
a riot.
August
26, 1847: Trial begins in Carlisle of Dickinson
College professor John McClintock and thirty-four
local African
American citizens
on charges
of rioting, rescuing two slaves who were lawfully
within the possession of their owner, and assault
and battery
on slaveholder
John Kennedy,
who died from his injuries, and bystander John
Black. McClintock and twenty-one of the defendants
were
acquitted of all
charges. Eleven of
those found guilty served nine months in Eastern
Penitentiary in solitary confinement before their
sentence was reversed
by the
state Supreme Court.
August
27, 1839: The slave ship Amistad is discovered
by a U.S. Coast Guard brig off the coast of Long Island.
Two
surviving crewmembers told of the mutiny
by slaves to secure their freedom. It took a
U.S. Supreme Court decision to finally return the Africans
home
to their
Mende
tribal
lands late
in 1841.
August
29, 1835: A colonization meeting, billed as an “anti-abolition” meeting,
is held in the Dauphin County Courthouse. The
meeting is attended by Charles C. Rawn, who agrees to draft an address
of the Harrisburg Colonization
Society’s aims.
August 29, 1963: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Washington Memorial during the “March on Washington” civil rights demonstration.
August 30, 1839: The Amistad is towed into New London, Connecticut and its 53 African revolutionists are imprisoned, pending trial for murder and piracy. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Africans. They were finally put on a ship and returned to Africa.
August 31, 1854: Harrisburg abolitionists welcome William James Watkins, Associate Editor of The Frederick Douglass Paper, cousin of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and eloquent African American speaker, to town.
September
September 1, 1780: The first Harrisburg area slave holder to register slaves according the 1780 Gradual Abolition Act is Elizabeth Carson, who registered her “Negro Male,” Pompey, aged fourteen years, as a “slave for life.”
September 1, 1835: A follow up meeting of Harrisburg anti-abolition supporters is held in a market shed on the square, after being barred from meeting in the county courthouse. Impassioned speeches are delivered by J. J. Clendenin, publisher Henry K. Strong, and attorney Charles C. Rawn.
September 2, 1914: Artist Romare Bearden is born in Charlotte, North Carolina.
September 3, 1838: Frederick Douglass, an enslaved man in Maryland, escapes from slavery in Fells Point, Baltimore. Douglass would become a tireless campaigner for African American social, political, and legal rights.
September
4,
1838: American Anti-slavery Society agent Daniel Alexander
Payne visits with William C. Goodridge in York, as part of his lecturing
circuit
of Pennsylvania.
During his
trip, he met with anti-slavery leaders in each location and
distributed literature.
September
11, 1851: Slaveholder Edward Gorsuch is killed while attempting
to recover runaways who had taken shelter with William Parker
in Christiana,
Pennsylvania.
The “Christiana Resistance” marks the first organized
armed resistance by free African Americans against slave
catchers in defiance
of the Fugitive Slave Law.
September
15, 1830: Annual Negro Conventions begin in Philadelphia.
Meeting in Bethel Church, delegates began the annual events
that would
coordinate African American resistance to slavery and anti-Black
legislation.
September
18, 1850: President Millard Fillmore signs the Fugitive Slave
Act into law.
September
18, 1895: Booker T. Washington delivers his Atlanta Compromise
speech
at the Cotton States and International Exhibition in that
city (“Cast
Down Your Buckets Where You Are.”)
September
21, 2002: A new tombstone, with corrected date of birth,
is dedicated at Lincoln Cemetery in Harrisburg, for Thomas
Morris
Chester. (photos of event
here)
September
22, 1862: President Lincoln declares that all slaves in states in rebellion
as of January 1, 1863, would be free.
September
24, 1862: Fourteen governors of Northern states meet
in Altoona, Pennsylvania and approve the emancipation
measures
of President
Lincoln.
September 25, 1838: AAS agent Daniel Alexander Payne arrives in Carlisle, where he stays with William Webb and visits barber and anti-slavery activist John Peck.
September
25, 1851: Harrisburg is panicked as four African American
strangers passing through town are rumored
to be murderous
rioters from Christiana.
With the help of local men from Matamoras, the four
are arrested and taken back to Harrisburg. There, District
Judge John
J. Pearson dismisses
charges for lack of evidence against the four men
accused of having participated in the Christiana Riots To Judge
Pearson's dismay, Federal Fugitive Slave Commissioner Richard
McAllister immediately
seizes the men in the courtroom and remands them
south as fugitive
slaves, after a short hearing.
September
28, 1785: David Walker is born in Wilmington, North
Carolina. His “Appeal
in Four Articles, together with a Preamble, to the
Coloured Citizens of the World,” published
in September 1829, outraged slaveholders because
it called for violent resistance to their captivity
by slaves.
September
30, 1850: Harrisburg lawyer Richard McAllister is
appointed by United States Chief Justice Roger B.
Taney to the
post of U.S.
Commissioner
to hear cases under the new Fugitive Slave Act. With
distinct pro-slaveholder sympathies, McAllister employs
several
Harrisburg constables as
deputies to actively and energetically pursue fugitive
slaves throughout central
Pennsylvania.
October
October 1, 1851: The “Jerry Rescue” takes place in New York. William Henry, known as “Jerry,” had escaped slavery and was working in New York when he was arrested under the new Fugitive Slave Law. He was successfully rescued by a crowd of abolitionists and African Americans, and became a symbol of defiance against the new and hated law.
October 1, 1857: The “Colored People’s Burying Ground” in Harrisburg at Meadow Lane and Chestnut Streets is sold at public auction, the last parcel of the old city burial grounds to be sold for development. Bodies are reinterred in the Harris Free Cemetery.
October 2, 1800: Nat Turner is born in Southampton County, Virginia.
October 2, 1851: During the night of Thursday, October 2, John Dunmore is arrested and taken before Richard McAllister and accused of being a runaway slave. The hearing was conducted behind closed doors and windows in McAllister's office. However the person who was seeking his return testified that Dunmore was not his slave, and Dunmore is released.
October
3, 1863: The War Department orders the enlistment of African American
troops in the slave states of Maryland, Missouri and
Tennessee.
October
8, 1831: William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper The
Liberator publishes the eloquent resolutions by many in Harrisburg’s
African American community strongly opposing the aims of
the American Colonization
Society. The resolution accuses the Colonization Society
as seeking to “drain
the country of the most enlightened part of our colored brethren,
so that they may be more able to hold their slaves in bondage
and ignorance.”
October
10, 1862: Confederate President Jefferson Davis asks Virginia
for a draft to supply 4500 Blacks to work on completing fortifications
around Richmond.
October 10, 1871: Equal rights activist and educator Octavius V. Catto is shot to death on Election Day in Philadelphia as he worked to protect African Americans at the polls.
October 11, 1722: Pennsylvania Colonial Governor William Keith sends a letter to local Native American tribes appealing for their help in returning fugitive slaves, promising “one Good Gun and two Blankets for each Negro,” returned to provincial authorities.
October 12, 1866: Chosen Friends Lodge No. 43, an African American Masonic Lodge, is warranted in Harrisburg.
October 13, 1864: Maryland voters narrowly adopt a new state constitution that abolishes slavery.
October
13, 2004: The Riverside School in Harrisburg
is renamed
the T. Morris Chester School to honor the city
native who became a famous attorney, war correspondent,
civil rights
activist
and political tactician
in Reconstruction-era Louisiana.
October
16, 1849: Clergyman Charles Avery gives money to
found a college to train young African Americans
for teaching
and
the ministry.
Avery Institute
was established at Allegheny, Pennsylvania and
received its first students in April 1850.
October 16, 1859: John Brown begins his raid of the U.S. Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in the last few hours of this day.
October
16, 1995: The Million Man March attracts one
of the
largest crowds
in history
to the
National Mall in Washington, DC to hear eighty
speakers advocate increased community involvement
and political
activism by
African American males.
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan organized
the event which drew an estimated 837,000 participants.
October
18, 1847: George Cole, a free African American
of Chambersburg, leads thirteen fugitive slaves
through
Shippensburg
and Huntsdale to the
barn of Daniel Kaufman near Boiling Springs.
Kaufman helped the slaves get
through to Harrisburg, but his actions were
detected and he was successfully sued in federal
court
by the slaveowners.
October
19, 1825: William Howard Day is born in New York.
October
24, 1834: Slave catchers kidnap the wife
and four children of James Williams, an African
American worker in Portsmouth,
Dauphin
County.
Williams and
local citizens track the kidnappers through
York, Pennsylvania, where Williams is reunited
with
his
wife, who had managed
to escape. The
next day a posse of citizens from York rescues
the children. The kidnappers
are tried, convicted and imprisoned in Harrisburg.
October
25, 1836: American Anti-slavery Society lecturer Jonathan Blanchard arrives
in Harrisburg
for about two weeks
of lectures. He stays
with the Alexander
Graydon family, on Market Street.
October
30, 1836: Abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard
delivers a sermon at the Harrisburg Presbyterian
Church, triggering aA number of longtime
church
members
to walk out in
protest against his anti-slavery politics.
October 31, 1780: Deadline for slave holders in Pennsylvania to register their slaves with the county clerk, according to the newly passed Gradual Abolition Law. The penalty for failure to register their slaves on time was immediate emancipation of the slaves.
November
November 1, 1910: A new publication, The Crisis, edited by W.E.B. DuBois, makes its appearance.
November 2, 1836: American Anti-slavery Society lecturer Jonathan Blanchard lectures in the town of Dauphin.
November 3, 1836: American Anti-slavery Society lecturer Jonathan Blanchard lectures in the town of Halifax.
November 4. 1836: American Anti-slavery Society lecturer Jonathan Blanchard lectures in the town of Millersburg.
November 5, 1968: Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African American woman elected to Congress.
November 6, 1860: Abraham Lincoln is elected sixteenth president of the United States.
November 7, 1775: Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, issues a proclamation promising freedom to slaves who would run away from rebel owners to fight for the British army. Several thousand would do so, including some from the Harrisburg area.
November 7, 1837: Elijah Lovejoy is murdered at Alton, Illinois and becomes a martyr for abolitionists.
November 8, 1775: Titus, slave of John Corlies of Monmouth County, New Jersey, escapes to start his own guerilla fight against local plantations in the name of the British. Known as Colonel Tye, he led a mixed race band of fighters, based in the cedar swamps of New Jersey, against Continental forces from July 1779 until his death from wounds in September 1780.
November
8, 1938: Crystal Bird Fauset is elected to the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives, becoming the first African American
woman to serve in a state house of
representatives.
November
10, 1983: Wilson Goode is elected as the first
African American mayor of Philadelphia.
November
11, 1836: American Anti-slavery Society lecturer Jonathan Blanchard speaks
at Harrisburg’s Masonic Hall. The lecture is attended by local
attorney Charles C. Rawn, who begins to reconsider
his anti-abolitionist views.
November
14, 1849: Martin R. Delany arrives in Harrisburg
to deliver lectures over the next five days.
He stayed with John
F. and Hannah Williams
after discovering that no local hotel would rent
a room to a black man.
November
14, 1865: Harrisburg welcomes the United States Colored Troops home,
hosting a large parade, reception and public
dinner. This
Grand Review
of Colored
Troops
featured speeches by William Howard Day, Simon
Cameron, J. C. White and Octavius
Catto. T. Morris Chester was Master of Ceremonies.
November
16, 1877: Lincoln Cemetery in Harrisburg is
dedicated as the burial ground for Wesley Union
A.M.E.
Church. Burials
from
the old cemetery,
located
at Boas and Rose Streets, began the following
week.
November
17, 1846: Trial in Gettysburg of infamous slave catcher/kidnapper Thomas
Finnegan results in
his conviction for kidnapping.
He is sentenced to
five year in Eastern Penitentiary, but is
pardoned in June 1848 by Governor Francis R. Shunk due
to failing health.
November
23, 1803: Abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld is born in
Hampton, Connecticut.
December
December 1, 1861: Secretary of War Simon Cameron proposes in his Annual Report that captured slaves be immediately emancipated and armed to fight in the war. Lincoln rejected the proposal, but Cameron released the report to the newspapers anyway, resulting in his reassignment as Minister to Russia.
December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks is arrested and fined after she refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, setting off protests and a boycott, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Supreme Court eventually ended segregation on city buses.
December 2, 1859: John Brown is hanged at 11:30 a.m. at Charles Town, Virginia. He left a written statement, which said “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land, will never by purged away, but with Blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”
December 3, 1836: Anti-slavery men in Gettysburg form the Adams County Antislavery Society at Clarkson’s Academy, after being driven from the county courthouse by anti-abolition rowdies.
December 3, 1844: Underground Railroad activist Charles T. Torrey is convicted of aiding fugitive slaves escape from Maryland into Pennsylvania. He was sentenced to six years in the Maryland Penitentiary, where he died in May 1846 of tuberculosis.
December 3, 1900: William Howard Day dies in Harrisburg. Many African American notables, including W.E.B. DuBois, attend his funeral.
December
4, 1833: Black and white delegates gather in Philadelphia’s
Adelphi Building to discuss forming a national anti-slavery society.
James Miller McKim attends to represent the greater Harrisburg area.
The
resulting American
Anti-Slavery Society would send speakers throughout Pennsylvania,
resulting in a blossoming of small, local anti-slavery societies.
December
7, 1833: The American Antislavery Society is officially formed,
in Philadelphia.
December
9, 1828: Facing financial hardship, Archibald McAllister
of Fort Hunter advertises, “I wish to dispose of
all my colored people at private sale.” Included
is Sally Craig, a slave for life, sixty-one years old.
December
11, 1836: American Anti-slavery Society lecturer Jonathan
Blanchard preaches during evening services at Harrisburg
Presbyterian
Church. Among those
in attendance is attorney Charles C. Rawn.
December
11, 1851: The jury in the Christiana Treason trial
takes only fifteen minutes to
return a
verdict of “Not
Guilty” on charges of treason for Castner Hanway
in the riot at the William Parker house. The verdict
outrages Southern slaveholders and politicians.
December
13, 1836: Attorney Charles C. Rawn welcomes Reverend
William Radcliff DeWitt to his home to discuss slavery
and abolition.
Rawn expresses
the opinion that slavery should be abolished in Washington
DC, and that abolition
aught to be openly and publicly debated.
December
13, 1848: Pennsylvania State Convention of Coloured Citizens meets in Harrisburg
to devise
a plan to petition
the state legislature to restore the vote to African
American men.
December
16, 1859: Two African American men who were captured
with John Brown during his raid on Harpers Ferry, Shields
Green
and John
Copeland,
are hanged at Charlestown for their role in the plot.
They were buried beneath
the gallows and soon thereafter disinterred by local
medical students for dissection.
December 17, 1748: John Harris the settler dies. His will stipulates that his slave Hercules be set free, and “be allowed to live on a part of the tract purchased of James Allcorn left to my son William,” marking the beginning of a free Black community in Harrisburg.
December 18, 1828: Sally Craig, longtime slave of Archibald McAllister at Fort Hunter, escapes after being put up for sale at age sixty-one. She is never recovered.
December 18, 1863: The 13th Amendment to the Constitution is declared in effect by Secretary of State Seward after it is ratified by twenty-seven states.
December 19, 1875: Carter G. Woodson, the “father of African American history,” is born in New Canton, Virginia.
December
20, 1860: South Carolina becomes the first state to secede from the Union.
December
24, 1829: The Pennsylvania General Assembly
votes to support the goals of the American
Colonization
Society
in sending
free African
Americans
to Liberia. It passes a resolution urging
the U.S. Congress to do the same, arguing
that
the removal
of free blacks
from the
United States
would be “highly auspicious to the
best interests of our country.”
December
25, 1839: Benjamin Tucker Tanner, African American minister and A.M.E.
bishop, is born
in Pittsburgh.
Tanner studied
at Avery
Institute, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, was
a writer, poet and editor of the Christian
Recorder newspaper, and received a D.D. from Wilberforce
University in 1878.
December 31, 1777: The ban on recruitment of African
American soldiers in the Continental Army
is lifted by
General George Washington,
clearing
the
way for the service of more than 5,000
African American men on the colonial side
during
the Revolutionary war.
December 31, 1782: Final day for residents of disputed territory in western Pennsylvania to register their slaves according to law. The deadline was extended in this area, which had been claimed by Virginia, because Pennsylvania did not ratify the border until September 23, 1780.
December
31, 1851: Sixteen-year-old Rachel Parker is kidnapped by Thomas
McCreary from the Chester County farm
of Joseph and
Rebecca Miller. Joseph Miller and some
neighbors track the
kidnapped girl to
a Baltimore slave
prison and alert authorities, then
prepare to take the train home. Miller, however,
would be
waylaid
and murdered
in Baltimore.
Covering
the history of African Americans in central Pennsylvania from the colonial
era through the Civil War.
Support the Afrolumens Project. Buy the books:
The Year of Jubilee, Volume One: Men of God, Volume Two: Men of Muscle