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Activists
Individuals involved in public actions designed to bring about political and social change. African Americans have a long history of activism. From the colonial period to the present day, African American activists have fought for civil rights and equal political and economic opportunity while debating the place of African Americans within American society.
Colonial and Revolutionary America
During the colonial period, more than 90 percent of African Americans were slaves. Thus, the earliest African American activists were rebel slaves. During colonial times, numerous slave revolts or attempted revolts were recorded. Many slaves also petitioned colonial governors for their freedom, having few other options for protest open to them.
The Revolutionary War raised awareness of the status of blacks in America. During the Revolutionary period, free blacks began to both protest against unequal treatment under the law and to establish political and religious organizations, such as the African Union Society (1780); the Free African Society (1787), founded by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones; and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816).
Various black activists challenged existing laws during this period. In the late 1770s, Massachusetts ship owners Paul Cuffe and his brother, John, began refusing to pay their taxes in protest of their inability to vote. In 1777, Prince Hall, founder of the first black Masonic lodge, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to end slavery, and in 1787, he protested the exclusion of blacks from Boston's public schools. In 1791, free blacks in South Carolina petitioned the state legislature, protesting a 1740 law that denied them some civil liberties. While many of these protests were unsuccessful, they hinted at growing black political strength.
In addition to agitating for black civil rights, early African American activists also debated among themselves over their future place in American society. Cuffe and Hall both supported the fledgling African colonization movement, although most African Americans opposed it, including Methodist preacher and bishop Richard Allen, who led a 3,000-person protest against it in 1817.
The Antebellum Era and the Civil War
The period from 1820 through the Civil War saw an expansion of black activism, due in part to the increasing growth of free black communities in the North. In 1827, abolitionist John Russwurm and Presbyterian minister Samuel Cornish founded Freedom's Journal, the first African American–owned newspaper and a voice for black civil rights.
In 1829, black abolitionist David Walker published his militant Appeal, which urged slaves to revolt against their masters if necessary to gain freedom. Other black abolitionists of the period included Charles Lenox Remond and his sister Sarah Parker Remond, Robert Purvis, Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Sarah Douglass, Maria Stewart, and William Wells Brown. Among the most well known today are the abolitionists Sojourner Truth, one of the earliest black female activists and a powerful speaker, and Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most prominent African American activist of the nineteenth century.
While these activists early on aligned themselves with white-run abolitionist organizations such as William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, eventually they began to split on the issue of how abolition was to be achieved. While the Garrisonians favored nonviolent protest and “moral susasion,” a number of African American activists, including Garnet, Charles Remond, and Frederick Douglass, began to believe that violent rebellion—or even war—might be a necessary solution.
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