Race and Class in 19th Century Philadelphia

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Memorial Irish railroad workers 1832

“...no one gave a damn for the poor Irish.” p.178

“In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation…,” Karl Marx

Noel Ignatiev

Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White was my LeftBook group’s reading for the last two sessions. It is a provocative history of the Irish in Philadelphia 1800 through Reconstruction, and a New Left classic (although published in 1995). Some might complain Ignatiev unduly demonizes the poor Irish immigrants for defending slavery and adopting American race prejudice. But it is largely the ugly story of white supremacy in American history, and not particular to the Irish. My favorite history teacher at Temple University Center City, Herb Ershkowitz, called the US a slave republic until the Civil War. Thereafter it might be called a white republic. Congress voted in 1790 that only white persons could be naturalized as citizens. It took the 13, 14, and 15th Amendments in 1865 to establish the citizenship of black people, and presumably other non-white persons. The Irish fled British colonialism and the potato famine in the Old World, only to encounter new social and racial conflicts in the New World. Like many subsequent immigrant groups to the US, the Irish were poor and scorned by native born Americans, but gradually climbed the class ladder and became natives themselves. Of course, this option was not available to African Americans.

Noel Ignatiev (aka Noel Ignatin) teaches history at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He has a lengthy resume on the Left. He joined the Communist Party as a teenager in West Philadelphia in 1958, and soon left with a breakaway faction called the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC, 1958-1966). His memoir of the POC is online. Ignatiev and POC comrade Ted Allen introduced the concept of “white-skin privilege” to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in their 1967 pamphlet White Blindspot. They argued “The US ruling class has made a deal with the mis-leaders of American Labor, and through them with the masses of white workers. The terms are these: you white workers help us conquer the world and enslave the non-white majority of the earth’s laboring force, and we will repay you with privileges befitting your white skin.” This concept was widely adopted in the New Left.

In 1969 Ignatiev and others founded Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-1986) in Chicago. They held two principle positions: (1) White workers must repudiate their white skin privileges and support African American and Latino struggles to unite the working class; and (2) workers must form independent workers’ organizations outside the unions to develop proletarian consciousness and autonomy. The second idea was inspired by syndicalist ideas from the IWW, and the works of Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, who advocated workers councils as the foundation of real socialism. Our group Philadelphia Solidarity held similar views. We met Ignatiev in the 1970s when he visited family in Philadelphia. When he got laid off from the steel industry in the 1980s, Ignatiev enrolled in graduate school, and wrote his thesis on the Irish in his hometown Philadelphia, and began his academic vocation. How the Irish Became White is informed by his perspective on race and class derived from long years in industry and on the Left. He is not an ivory tower Marxist.

C.L.R.James

Ignatiev details the complicated interplay between race and class, ethnicity and religion, native and immigrant. The early Irish immigrants were mostly so-called Scotch-Irish, ie Protestants from Northern Ireland. Eight of the 56 original signers of the Declaration of Independence were Irish Americans. In the 19th century the Irish came in large numbers, and were poorer and Catholic from Ireland proper. According to censuses, a third of all immigration to the US between 1820 and 1860 were Irish. Ignatiev puts the number between 800,000 to one million. These Irish were escaping British oppression, and later the potato famine in the 1840s. 

In the 18th century Irish Catholics were ruled by the British Penal Laws. Catholics could not vote or hold public office; they could only own or rent small plots of land; they were barred from most professions; Protestants who married Catholics lost their civil rights. In mid century Catholics held only 7% of Irish land. They were essentially an oppressed people in their own country. A movement for Home Rule, or Repeal, led by Lord Mayor of Dublin Daniel O’Connell campaigned for an independent Irish Parliament and civil rights in the 1830s and 1840s. The Repeal movement in Ireland was also abolitionist, and implored their Irish cousins in America to oppose slavery. William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionist movement in America had great hopes that poor Irish immigrants would find common cause with enslaved African Americans. Frederick Douglass even visited Ireland in the 1840s to promote abolition, although he was careful not to criticize England.

Unfortunately, the Irish in America did not heed Daniel O’Connell and the Irish clergy’s call to oppose slavery. Ignatiev argues new Irish immigrants were not initially considered “white” in America’s racial and class hierarchy. They had to compete against slaves and free Blacks to secure employment. They arrived in the US largely without skills and took jobs as servants, laborers, and factory hands. Ignatiev describes how Irish labor was hired to dig canals and build roads because they would work for less than free Blacks or slaves, who were too valuable to lose to injury or disease. Irish immigrants and free Blacks were packed into the same neighborhoods in Philadelphia. There was both fellowship and conflict.

Nativists opposed Irish and Catholic immigration. In Philadelphia, Protestants rioted against the growing Irish population regularly during 1830-1850s. The disputes were about labor conditions in the mills, religion in the public schools, and the Irish support of slavery. The Irish embraced the Democratic Party and the nascent labor movement in self-defense. Early labor unions began in Philadelphia in the 1820s and were largely English and “white”. The Irish gradually became central actors in the unions and the Democratic Party in the city. In Philadelphia this included the control of the police and fire departments, and local politicians. By the end of the 19th century, half the presidents of AFL unions nationwide were Irish or their descendants.

The Irish also displaced free Black labor. This is the thesis of Ignatiev’s book. He argues Irish immigrants used their white skin privilege and the race prejudice of white unions to claim jobs in manufacture and domestic work that had formerly employed free blacks. He feels the New Labor Historians of the 1960s, much like the Old Left, romanticized the labor movement of the 19th century which was an exclusive club for white workers only. 

Of course, this is the central dilemma of American history for the left and labor. Why couldn’t white workers ally with their working class black brothers and sisters to oppose chattel and wage slavery? Why did white workers in the South go to war and 100,000s die to defend the Southern planters and aristocrats? In this regard, I don’t see how the Irish were any better or worse than other white workers. Many Irish died for the Union as well as the Confederacy. Racial ideology was used successfully to divide the working class, and the divide continues to this day.

Ignatiev states abolitionists did not address the cause of free labor, which was also exploited. I know abolitionist Lucretia Mott preached for the eight hour day in the 1850s, and other advanced thinkers may have also. The abolitionists made a big impact despite their small numbers, but they missed the opportunity to connect the emancipation of free labor- black, white, other- and enslaved labor.

How the Irish Became White was reprinted in 2008, so Ignatiev is still being read. The lineage of white supremacy is receiving renewed attention with the ascendancy of Trump. Noel Ignatiev’s book is sadly contemporary.

Lori L. Tharps Confronts Colorism in America

Lori L. Tharps, Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America's Diverse Families (Boston: Beacon Press: 2016).

Calida Garcia Rawles, Same Difference (2010).

Tess Gerould (l) and Lori Tharps (r) at Elkins Park Library 02.22.17

"God is the color of water." James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.

I commend journalist Lori Tharps for tackling a difficult subject in her new book Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America's Diverse Families. Race and color and class, light-skin, dark-skin. Colorism is defined by Alice Walker as "prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color." Race is actually a scientific fiction, whereas different skin-colors are real, and usually stand as a proxy for race. Inside African American, Latino, Asian, and mixed-race families in the US there exists a large spectrum of skin-color. Unfortunately, people are treated differently by their family or society according to their skin color. Tharps tells the history of skin-color politics in these four communities, and then shares the often painful personal testimony of many people as the light or dark member of their family or community. Discrimination by skin color is a type of racism that is still pervasive.

Lori Tharps is a Temple University Professor of Journalism who lives in Mt. Airy, my old Philadelphia neighborhood. Colorism is a personal issue for her. She is African American and her husband Spanish (ie Caucasian), and their three children are mixed-race with all different skin tones. She and her husband are faced with the real problems facing Mixed-Race families, which are somewhat different than those facing other minority families. The light-skin child is doted on by the local dry cleaner, whereas the darker-skin child is ignored. Lori's husband finds a new dry cleaner to patronize. Lori gets asked if she is the nanny of her light-skin daughter when they walk in the park. My wife Tess had the same experience when we moved to suburban Elkins Park from Philadelphia 25 years ago. Our elderly neighbor assumed Tess was the nanny since my wife has brown skin, and our young daughter was light-skin. Tharps finds herself relieved when her second child is darker, visibly sharing mommy's skin tone. Are we all confined to our designated clans? Are times changing?

Skin color and race are two different things, although entangled in complicated ways. Africans were brought to the US as slaves to labor for European (ie Caucasian) settlers, who dispossessed the indigenous people as well. A strict racial hierarchy was quickly instituted so that African-Americans would remain chattel slaves permanently. But of course, from day one, there were sexual relations between black and white whether consensual or non-consensual. By the wonders of the genetic lottery, their children had all different skin tones and phenotypes. A light-skin privilege developed in the African American community, and a similar story was true for Asian, Latino, and mixed-race communities. The light-skin offspring of the White slave master and enslaved African women often became the house servants rather than agricultural laborers. This first privilege afforded them some access to education and assimilation into the White world. Tharps notes that after Emancipation, light-skin African Americans became the economic elite and the leaders of their community. She says, "many historically Black colleges, including Howard University and Spellman College, had unofficial but well-known admission preferences for light-skinned students who came from wealthy, professional families." This also held true for many professional societies and social groups, even churches. This the origin of the so-called "paper bag test." If you were darker than a brown paper bag, you could not join said organization. The racism of the dominant White culture got reproduced in the Black community.

Skin-color politics in the Latino and Asian communities have different narratives. The Latino community in the US derives from the Caribbean, Central and South America, and ultimately motherland Spain. They bring with them the legacy of Spanish colonialism in Latin America. The Spanish and the Portuguese enslaved the Native Americans and Africans just like the British colonists, but were more tolerant of interracial relationships and marriage. As a result, "a large portion of the Spanish-speaking world has African roots." The problem is the ruling class in Spain and Latin America  was reserved for those with "pure Spanish blood" only. This produced a skin-color hierarchy in Latino societies that persists to this day. The Latino population in the US does not fit neatly into black-white census categories. In 1970 the term "Hispanic" was introduced to resolve this dilemma. Nonetheless, light-skin or white Latinos still dominate Spanish-language media and business. Anti-Black sentiment is commonplace. A crude example was Univision host Rodner Figueroa comparing First Lady Michelle Obama's appearance to that of a cast member of "Planet of the Apes" in 2015. Ouch.

Tharps had some difficulty ferreting out the root of colorism in the Asian community. The largest Asian groups in the US come from China, Philippines, India, Korea, and Japan. Each has its distinct culture and history. Initially her East Asian subjects denied any skin-color prejudice in their native cultures, but later acknowledged it. Whether due to European colonialism or something older, there is a premium for  pale skin in East Asia, particularly as an ideal for feminine beauty. Foreigners were also disfavored. The Pearl Buck Society was formed after WWII to find homes for mixed-race children from the war that were outcast from their societies. My wife grew up mixed race in Japan in the 50s, and her mother and aunties were always admonishing her to get out of the sun so she didn't turn too dark. Skin-color is also a defining issue in South Asia where it is linked to caste and class. Again the upper class tends to be light-skin, and tends to be the immigrant class to the US. They bring their attitudes with them to the complex racial landscape in the US.

So much for the histories of colorism. Most of Tharps’ book is devoted to how skin color impacted peoples lives. In general light skin conferred privilege and opportunity in a racist society. Some parents were oblivious to their children's struggles; others were more sensitive and protective. Some light skin subjects testified they felt neglected or excluded because they weren't black enough. Teenagers (and grown-ups) can be very cliquish. What if the Black kids, the Asian kids, and the White kids sit at different lunchroom tables, and you don't fit in anywhere? This can cause enough pain and confusion to last a lifetime. Skin color impacts educational choices, choosing a romantic partner, finding a job, picking a neighborhood. It is formative.

Tharps notes that skin-color politics and race are "close cousins." In fact, in an increasingly multi-cultural society, perhaps skin color is the only way to classify people if society insists on racial categories. With Donald Trump's election, nativists in the US are attempting to reverse the tide of immigration and intermarriage. I think they will fail. Lori Tharps voices the growing awareness of the injury colorism causes to people and communities. It is no longer taboo to examine skin color politics. She blogs about identity politics, parenting and pop culture at myamericanmeltingpot.com and her professional site at loritharps.com. She pushes all of us to overcome our tribal allegiances and embrace our common humanity. That can't be so hard.

John Brown Lives

Louis A. DeCaro Jr.. John Brown: The Cost of Freedom. New York: International Publishers, 2007.

_____. John Brown: The Man Who Lived. Essays in Honor of the Harper's Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009. New York: Lulu, 2009.

_____. John Brown, Emancipator. Middletown, DE, 2012.

Robert L. Tsai. "John Brown's Constitution." Boston College Law Review Vol 51 Issue 1 (2010): 151-207.

The John Brown Society
Box 1046, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013

"From the night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass. 1847 while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful for its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man's strong impressions." Frederick Douglass

I attend the Left Forum in NYC every year hoping to learn something new. My discovery this year was the John Brown Society panel with Society Chairman Larry Lawrence, actor and playwright Norman Thomas Marshall, and historian Louis A. DeCaro Jr. The John Brown Society promotes John Brown education and scholarship, and speaks at events like the Left Forum, and John Brown Day (his birthday) at the John Brown Farm State Historical Site in Lake Placid, NY in May. Norman Thomas Marshall and director George Wolf Reily are co-authors of the one-man drama John Brown: Trumpet of Freedom, which Marshall has performed in theaters and schools for twenty years. Louis A. DeCaro Jr. is an Associate Professor at Alliance Theological Seminary in NYC, and a prolific John Brown biographer. His John Brown the Abolitionist-A Biographers Blog reports on his current scholarship, and related news. He is also the pastor of a small urban congregation in the Bronx.

John Brown 1856

John Brown is one of the most controversial religious and political figures in American history. His fortunes in the popular culture track the state of race relations in the US. During the Civil War and immediately following, Brown was a hero and martyr. Black and white Union soldiers sang The John Brown Song while marching off to war: "John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave, His soul is marching on!" When Reconstruction waned with the Long Depression (1873-1879), Southern lost-cause historians and racists North and South recast John Brown as fanatic and failed businessman. Even civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard (1872-1949), the grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, called Brown "a principled murderer" in his influential book John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (1909). Villard indicts Brown for killing five pro-slavery neighbors along the Pottawatomie Creek in 1856 during the bloody Kansas conflict. At mid-20th century, liberal Southern historian C. Van Woodward and psychologist Kenneth B. Clark both called Old Man John Brown mentally unstable, and the instigator of a "needless war." This is the version I learned in my white suburban high school in the 1960s. Louis A. DeCaro Jr. has a great essay The John Browns of History in his John Brown: The Man Who Lived. Essays in Honor of the Harper's Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009, wherein he catalogs the myriad accounts of abolitionist John Brown over the years. Historian Louis DeCaro, activist Larry Lawrence, and performer Norman Marshall are leading a revival of John Brown studies to restore Brown's complex role in American history.

Of course, John Brown was most revered by the left and African Americans. His left admirers included labor journalist John Swinton (1829-1901), socialist Eugene Debs, civil rights founder W.E.B. Du Bois, and Communist historian Herbert Aptheker. Both Du Bois and Aptheker wrote biographies of John Brown. Brown's abolitionism was inspired by religious faith, like M. L. King, not by populism or socialism which was just emerging before the Civil War. A few African American critics disdained Brown. Vincent Harding regarded Brown as paternalistic and Ralph Ellison called Brown "demonic" and "utterly impractical." But most black leaders in the late 19th and early 20th century held John Brown in high esteem. Harriet Tubman said, "When I think how he gave up his life for our people, and how he never flinched, but was brave to the end, it's clear to me that it wasn't mortal man, it was God in him (1863)."

Harriet Tubman

Louis A. DeCaro Jr. John Brown: the Cost of Freedom (2007) is a concise biography of abolitionist Brown. It includes an appendix of recently discovered Brown letters and documents, which reveal more intimately Brown's thinking and character. John Brown was born May 9, 1800 in Connecticut of abolitionist and Puritan parents. He apprenticed in his father's tannery business, and then operated his own tannery in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Later he became a cattle trader and breeder, and an authority in the sheep and wool business. He had 20 children with two wives! Eleven children survived to adulthood. His first wife Dianthe died in childbirth. He had several business failures. Somehow he and second wife Mary Ann Day (1817-1884) overcame hardship and tragedy. They raised a huge family, and later organized a social movement as well.

John Brown was always anti-slavery and active in the cause. In 1837 he took a public vow at church, "Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery." This was prompted by the murder of abolitionist journalist Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in southern Illinois a few days earlier. When he moved his business to Springfield, MA in 1846, he became deeply engaged with the abolitionists there. He joined the African American Stanford Street "Free Church" (aka St. John's Congregational Church) where he met the luminaries of the movement: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and the literati who later bankrolled his raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859.

John Brown at Springfield League of Gileadites meeting

What is striking about John Brown is that he regarded African Americans as his equal, as brothers and sisters. This was rare in his time, even among white abolitionists. He crossed the color line. In 1850 he founded the League of Gileadites in Springfield MA , a militant interracial group in response to the Fugitive Slave Act to protect escaped slaves in the free states. According to historian Louis DeCaro Jr., John Brown was already formulating more radical plans to attack slavery ten years before the raid on Harper's Ferry. He argued that moral suasion had failed, and that compromise had failed. In reality guns, not votes, would decide the fate of slavery. As John Brown later testified in his trial for treason in 1859, the country was "on the eve of one of the greatest wars in history". If the slaveholders won, it would mark "an end of all aspirations for human freedom."

The Brown home in Springfield MA

In 1849 Brown moved his family to a black settlement in North Elba NY in the Adirondacks near Lake Placid. Wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith donated thousands of acres to freemen as an agrarian refuge from urban poverty and racism. The colony was affectionately known as "Timbucto". This was Brown's last home and the site of the John Brown Farm and Gravesite, a national historical landmark. I would like to visit the farmstead on John Brown Day. I would also like to explore the museums and St. John's Congregational Church in Springfield MA for John Brown history. Brown's Bible remains on display at the church.

Between 1855 and 1858 John Brown joined his older sons in Kansas to lead the armed defense of the free state settlers. Bleeding Kansas was the first act of the Civil War. Brown became a wanted man. He had to go underground to avoid arrest. He began organizing his fateful raid on the Harper's Ferry US Armory and Arsenal in ernest. Louis DeCaro Jr. argues Brown's plan was well conceived but badly executed. Brown's idea was to establish guerrilla resistance in the Southern mountains to attract runaway slaves, and undermine the viability of the slave economy over time. He raised money and recruits in the North as well in free black communities in Canada. He even held a constitutional convention on May 8, 1858 in Chatham, Ontario, where 34 blacks and 12 whites committed to abolish slavery, and passed the "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States." This would be the founding document of the "Appalachian State" and would govern their guerrilla republic in exile. The document included many features from the US Constitution while abolishing slavery and enfranchising women. Harriet Tubman (Brown called her "General Tubman") supported the plan, but in the end, Frederick Douglass opposed it which created a terrible rift between the old comrades.

Frederick Douglass

On Sunday morning, October 16, 1859, Brown led a solemn reading of the Provisional Constitution, and then set off with 21 men to capture the Harper's Ferry Armory with its 100,000 muskets and rifles. Remarkably, they succeeded with little bloodshed. He seized local slaveholders as hostages, and notified their slaves liberation was at hand. Unfortunately, John Brown tarried too long in Harper's Ferry. The next day he was pinned down in the Engine House by local militia, and the second day the US Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived and subdued Brown's band. Brown was swiftly tried and convicted of treason by the state of Virginia and hung in public December 2, 1859. Eleven months later, Lincoln was elected President and the Civil War began.

Slavery and race are so central to US history and politics. The story of John Brown merits scrutiny. Abolitionists were a small but diligent group in antebellum America. Education and religious appeals had ended slavery in the North, but were ineffectual in the South and new territories. Compromise was not possible. When the Civil War began, Lincoln's goal was to preserve the union, not abolish slavery, which was still too difficult to contemplate. Emancipation and arming black soldiers only came after three years of brutal war. John Brown foretold these events. Evidently many white Americans are still not reconciled to a multiracial and multicultural society 150 years later - witness the current 2016 presidential contest. John Brown remains contemporary.

Louis A. DeCaro Jr. has written six books on John Brown, the most recent Freedom's Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia (2015). He is probably not done yet.

The New Left in Philadelphia 1960-1970

Lyons, Paul. The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

“The people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities” (C. Wright Mills words) are the subject of Paul Lyon's study of the New Left in the 1960s Philadelphia. Mills felt the early focus on alienation, community, and meaning evident in The Port Huron Statement (1962) distinguished the New Left from the Old Left, with its rigid socialist and communist doctrines. Paul Lyons chronicles the distinctive New Left community that blossomed in Philadelphia and nearby suburbs during the 1960s. He argues the New Left was less sectarian and more ecumenical here due to the dominant influence of the Quakers, in the form of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and the Quaker schools and colleges. The Quaker institutions remain central to social justice activities in the Philadelphia to this day. The religious institutions have held up better than the New Left, needless to say.

Author Paul Lyons was a member and observer of the New Left in Philadelphia. He was a history instructor at Temple University from 1967-71, and then taught high school history at Miquon Upper School (now called Crefield School), a private school in Philadelphia until 1980. He received his PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1980 in social work, and then taught history, social welfare policy, and Holocaust studies for many years at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. His dissertation became his first book, Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). He has also written about the New Right, also born in the 1960s, and conservatism, which pervades the American landscape today. Lyon's was a much beloved professor at Stockton who died too young in 2009. The college has since established the annual Paul Lyons Memorial Lecture in American Studies in his honor.

The People of This Generation is a fun book for alumni of the New Left in Philadelphia. I found many old friends and adversaries scattered throughout Paul Lyon's account. I arrived in Philadelphia in Fall 1971, a little after Lyon's timeline in the aftermath of the 1960s. One of my close friends was Carl Gilbert, who informed Lyons about campus politics at Temple University 1960-1968. Temple was a subway commuter school, often regarded like City University of New York, with a large compliment of red diaper babies enrolled. Carl, also a red diaper baby, became chairperson of Student Peace Union chapter (SPU), and later a leader of Students for a Democratic Society chapter (SDS) when it formed in 1965. Carl had one foot in the Old Left, and one foot in the New Left. He was a member of Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL aka Yipsels), the youth group of the Socialist Party, which controlled SPU. Carl was already a Marxist and anti-Stalinist in high school, conversant with the ideological debates within the Old Left. At Temple he embarked on the New Left with SPU and SDS. SPU brought issues and prominent speakers to campus, volunteered in local public schools, joined with Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in civil rights protests in Philadelphia and the South. The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (aka SANE) and W.E.B. DuBois Club (led by English graduate student Jim Quinn), the youth group of the Communist Party, were also important actors at Temple. By 1966 the central issue for the New Left became the Vietnam War and the draft. Students and some faculty joined in campus speak-outs on the war, and marches on Washington. Temple never became host to a big student strike like the University of Pennsylvania in February 1969. The most serious Temple activists enlisted in various socialist and communist organizations after the collapse of SDS in 1968. My friend Carl Gilbert left Temple for a graduate program in 1967. His Temple Master's Thesis From “Integration” to “Black Power”: The Civil Rights Movement in the City of Philadelphia, 1960-67 was his account of those years.

Philadelphia Resistance Print Shop 1969

Paul Lyons regards the antiwar and anti-draft Philadelphia Resistance and the antiracist People for Human Rights (PHR) as the most successful New Left organizations of the 1960s in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Resistance organized draft resistance locally and nationally. They also founded Philadelphia Resistance Print Shop as a movement and commercial union printer. I spent many hours at their print shop over the years as a customer, a union official, and fellow printer. PHR was founded by Episcopal priest Rev. David M. Gracie in 1967 as an interracial support group advocating for school funding, housing, health care, and employment in the city. Episcopal priests Rev. Paul M. Washington at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, and Rev. John M. Scott at St. Mary's at the University of Pennsylvania were also prominent voices for racial justice in the 1960s and many years thereafter.

Rev. David M. Gracie

Rev.Paul M. Washington

Many in Lyon's The People of This Generation got their political education in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Some still live here, making the City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love home.


Gilbert, Carl. From “Integration” to “Black Power”: The Civil Rights Movement in the City of Philadelphia, 1960-67. Master's Thesis, Temple University, 1967.

Philadelphia's Finest 18th Century Abolitionist

Jackson, Maurice, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

–---, “Anthony Benezet: America's Finest Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Advocate.” The Human Tradition in the American Revolution, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden and Ian K. Steele. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Crosby, David L., ed. The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet 1754-1783: An Annotated Critical Edition. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Germantown Ave. and Wister St., Philadelphia

I don't know how I missed discovering Anthony Benezet in my undisciplined readings in US history. He may be the founder of the abolitionist movement in 18th century America, as well England and France, argues biographer Maurice Jackson in Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. And he was a Philadelphia homeboy, living in Germantown and what is now Old City sections of Philadelphia, and born a French Huguenot. This first piqued my interest. My Gerould family (my father's side) was French Huguenot. According to our family genealogy, compiled by Mrs. Mildred Gerould Wood in 1970, Jacques Jerauld fled the Province of Languedoc, France, sometime after the Crown's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had formerly offered religious tolerance to Protestants. My forebear Gamaliel Gerould was born in Medfield, Massachusetts, in 1719.

Anthony Benezet was born in Saint-Quentin, France in 1713 to a French Huguenot family. His family fled France in 1715, settled in London, then emigrated to Philadelphia in 1731 when Anthony was 18 years old. Anthony joined the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) in England in 1727, and joined the Friends in Philadelphia and environs at several meetings during his lifetime. He married Joyce Marriott of Burlington, NJ in 1731. She had been made a Quaker minister by the Philadelphia Meeting, surely a unique role for a young woman in colonial America. They had two children, who died in early childhood.

Benezet spent some years working unhappily in the trades. But his bookish nature, and love of children, led him to teaching. In 1739 he took a job as schoolmaster in Germantown (a neighborhood of Philadelphia, then a suburb), succeeding Francis Daniel Pastorius. He also worked as a proofreader, fluent in French, German, and English. In 1742 he began teaching at the Philadelphia Publick School, English (later known as William Penn Charter School), then located at 4th and Chestnut St. in present-day Old City Philadelphia. About 1750, Benezet also began teaching free black children in the evenings at no cost in his home, which he continued for 20 years. During this period he began an association with Quaker mystic John Woolman to advocate the end of the slave trade, and the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Quakers had debated the issue of slavery since at least 1688 when the Quakers of Germantown issued the first resolution condemning slavery. Slavery became a contentious issue in Quaker meetings in the colony and England for the next 100 years.



In 1753 John Woolman wrote Epistle to the Friends of Virginia, and in 1754 Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination, which called for the end of the slave trade and slavery. Benezet urged the Philadelphia Meeting to adopt Woolman's Epistle. The following year the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decided that Friends may no longer import or purchase slaves. Many Quakers freed their slaves. Benezet became the most outspoken advocate for abolition in the colonies, enlisting Woolman, deist Benjamin Franklin, and physician Benjamin Rush in the cause. From his daily association with free and enslaved Africans in Philadelphia, Benezet regarded blacks as the intellectual equals of whites, a very advanced position for the times. He cited Acts 17:24-26: “God, that made the world, hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the bounds of their habitation.” And he set out to prove it with a steady stream of tracts, the mass media of the day, which are all collected in The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754-1783: An Annotated Critical Edition, ed. David L. Crosby. He documented the horrors of the slave trade in West Africa, and achieved mass circulation in the colonies, England, and France. His arguments were religious and secular/philosophical, drawing from theology and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. He corresponded or influenced all the major abolitionists in England and France: John Wesley, founder of Methodism; Tom Paine, son of an English Quaker; Granville Sharp; Thomas Clarkson; William Wilberforce; Olaudah Equiano. It is inspiring in our dispirited times to see what he accomplished. This humble Philadelphia Quaker was a brilliant organizer.

Other Benezet exploits: in 1754 he resigned from the Publick School and opened the first school for girls in America under the auspices of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia; in 1755 he organized the relief for hundreds of Acadian French expelled from Nova Scotia, refugees of the French and Indian Wars; in 1775 he organized The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage with Pennsylvania Quakers, with Benjamin Franklin the honorary chair after the Revolution War. Benezet died in 1784, and bequeathed his estate to the African Free School which he founded. He said, “I can with truth and sincerity declare, that I have found amongst the negroes as great variety of talents as among a like number of white; and I am bold to assert, that the notion entertained by some, that the blacks are inferior in their capacities, is a vulgar prejudice, founded on the pride or ignorance of their lordly masters.” He was buried at the Friends Burial Ground at 4th and Arch Street, Philadelphia in an unmarked grave, as was the custom.

Observations on the Enslaving, Importing and
Purchasing of Negroes, Anthony Benezet 1759

The biographer Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies and Affiliate Professor of Performing Arts (Jazz) at Georgetown University. He also scores points with me as a former shipyard rigger, longshoreman, housepainter, community organizer, and fellow Antioch College alumnus. He did a lot of research in Philadelphia at the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on Locust Street. I'm sorry I missed his lecture at the Library Company in December 2013, available on YouTube. I hope he comes again.