Perhaps it is fitting that a place long associated with Quaker circumspection ceded the abolitionist spotlight to other locales. But Philadelphia’s ambivalent relationship to the abolitionist struggle, particularly during the nineteenth century when the movement became more diverse and aggressive, also explains its marginalized status. The city had vast economic ties to the South and Atlantic world, connecting Philadelphians to the mighty engine of slavery. Brotherly Love was not always accorded to racial reformers – particularly African Americans and women. For a city steeped in notions of tolerance, that is a difficult reality to confront.

For many years, Philadelphia abolitionism was a story of firsts. The 1688 Germantown Protest, which challenged the Society of Friends to treat African-descended people as brethren and not bondsmen, was the first formal protest against slavery in North America. While generations of Quakers gained wealth from both slaveholding and slave-derived commerce, the Philadelphia region soon became a seedbed of abolitionist thought. By the early 1700s, monthly meetings stretching from Burlington in West Jersey to Chester south of Philadelphia began debating slavery’s morality. The visible saints of this inaugural abolitionist wave – Ralph Sandiford (1693-1733), Benjamin Lay (1677-1759), John Woolman (1720-72), Anthony Benezet (1713-84) – rejected bondage as a necessary part of the modern world, but they were not always popular, even within the Society of Friends. Yet by crafting printed antislavery discourses steeped in secular as well as sacred tones, they also charted new directions for humanitarian reform. No longer was the righteous figure an inward-looking perfectionist; rather he or she was motivated to improve society too. By the Revolutionary era, when the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting banned bondage, Philadelphia Quakers could look proudly on a long history of abolitionism.

Pennsylvania Abolition Society

The second wave of abolitionism was also defined by firsts. The creation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) in 1775, and its reorganization and expansion in the 1780s, marked the beginning of secular abolitionism in the United States. Agitating for slavery’s end at the state and federal levels, and protecting endangered Blacks in courts of law, the PAS gained a glowing reputation throughout the Atlantic world. Although Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law of 1780 – the world’s first such statute, which liberated enslaved people born after the law’s passage at 28 – did not rely solely on PAS agitation, it drew from the matrix of ideas established by Benezet and his abolitionist colleagues. Over the next several decades, the group perfected legal and political lobbying by gaining support from respectable figures such as William Rawle (1759-1836), David Paul Brown (1795-1872), and Evan Lewis (1782-1834), noted lawyers all. With the American Convention of Abolition Societies, a biennial meeting of gradual antislavery groups created in 1794, often convening in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia was again an abolitionist stronghold.

Yet cracks emerged by the early 1800s. While the PAS aided many African Americans, the group failed to forcefully condemn the rising colonization movement, which supported Black exportation as a means of encouraging southern manumission. Popular in the North as well as the South, colonization deemed free Blacks anathema to white liberty. Still, the PAS did not launch an anti-colonization campaign – even as African Americans in Philadelphia did. Some PAS members also believed that abolitionism must never endanger the Union, no matter how much slavery expanded. The abolitionist cause sagged.

Hoping to reignite the movement, a third wave of abolitionism washed over the region between the 1820s and 1850s. Drawing energy from Black and female reformers, so-called “modern” abolitionists embraced more aggressive forms of protest. Following in the footsteps of Black founders like Richard Allen (1760-1831) and James Forten (1766-1842), who advocated racial equality but were prevented from joining the PAS (which did not admit its first Black member – Robert Purvis (1810-1898) – until 1842), Philadelphia’s Black abolitionist community supported new abolitionist ventures. These included both The Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society (a national organization formed in 1833 in Philadelphia), both of which espoused immediate, uncompensated, universal abolition and no compromises with slaveholders. Names told the tale of this abolitionist transformation, both in Philadelphia and beyond. While old-school “abolitionist” groups like the PAS sought to eradicate the legal institution of slavery, new-school “antislavery” societies rejected slaveholding itself as immoral. While some PASers joined the new antislavery crusade, relations between venerable and modern abolitionists remained fraught.

Black Activism

For that reason, Black activists played critical roles in antebellum antislavery circles. Serving as lecturers, fundraisers, and authentic voices of the oppressed, they pictured slavery and racism as twin evils haunting American society. With antislavery contacts stretching from New Jersey to Delaware, Black activists also made the Philadelphia region a hub of fugitive slave activity before the Civil War. In 1837, Black Philadelphians under the leadership of Purvis launched the Vigilant Committee to aid southern runaways, including such celebrated figures as William Crafts (1824-1900) and Ellen Crafts (1826-91) and Henry “box” Brown (c.1816-97). By the early 1850s, when the group was reborn as the Vigilance Committee (now including white members), free Black activist William Still (1821-1902), who hailed from New Jersey, served as its leading figure. Still’s group aided roughly 900 fugitives in the 1850s alone.

Female reformers also emerged as key antebellum abolitionists, locally and nationally. During the 1820s Elizabeth Chandler (1807-34), who worked alongside Garrison at Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, wrote powerfully about female abolitionists’ potential to reshape American antislavery struggles. At nearly the same time, Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) helped build the Free Produce Society (which disavowed slave-derived goods) into a powerful movement aimed at undercutting slavery’s economic standing in northern households. Angelina Grimke (1805-1879) and Sarah Grimke (1792-1873), South Carolinians who rejected bondage after settling in Philadelphia, became perhaps the most prominent female abolitionists in the nation during the 1830s when they began agitating against bondage. Angelina, who married celebrated abolitionist orator Theodore Dwight Weld and subsequently moved to Belleville, New Jersey, became the first woman to address a political body when she spoke before the Massachusetts legislature in 1838.

Women demonstrated their radicalism by establishing Philadelphia’s first integrated abolitionist organization in December 1833: the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society (PFASS). Predating both the Philadelphia Antislavery Society (1834) and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (1837), the group was composed of Black and white women who espoused immediate abolitionism. Between the 1830s and 1850s, members of the PFASS led petition drives, ran antislavery fairs, and served as the organizational backbone of area abolitionism. Little wonder that, by the early 1860s, a woman became perhaps the city’s leading antislavery voice: Republican Party activist Anna Dickinson (1842-1932).

Backlash

This newly aggressive brand of abolition caused a severe backlash. Indeed, Philadelphia witnessed a series of anti-abolition and anti-Black riots in the 1830s and 1840s that cast a long shadow over racial politics in the city. The infamous burning of Pennsylvania Hall (a newly built abolitionist meeting place) in May 1838 reminded activists that seemingly tolerant Philadelphia supported a violent brand of anti-abolitionism. Viewing race reformers – rather than their foes – as disturbers of the peace, many Philadelphia leaders kept a wary eye on abolitionists for years to come. At both the Great Central Fair of 1864 and the Centennial Exposition of 1876, civic authorities suppressed civil rights activity to prevent a reprise of 1838.

Ironically, while the Civil War vindicated northern abolition, it did not compel Philadelphians to honor living abolitionists in their midst. Instead, distant generations of Quakers became the face of Philadelphia abolitionism for their seeming quietude (a notion forgetting that they too were one-time agitators). It took new rounds of activism to overturn streetcar segregation in Philadelphia (in 1867) and return voting rights to African American men in Pennsylvania (via the Fifteenth amendment in 1870). Perhaps for that reason Black abolitionists like Octavius Catto (1839-71), an egalitarian reformer who was gunned down on election day in 1871, were still viewed as rabble rousers during Reconstruction. More than a century passed before Philadelphians truly reappraised antebellum reformers as civil rights heroes.

Richard S. Newman is Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology and the author of Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (NYU Press). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Although the number of new cases in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco multiplied quickly over the first two years of the epidemic, at first the number of people with AIDS in Philadelphia rose slowly. Within the first year, only seven cases were reported locally, but by early 1983 trends in Philadelphia seemed to be catching up to the rapidly growing epidemic witnessed in New York and California. The disease also appeared in New Jersey, particularly in the urban corridors between Philadelphia and New York and between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and in Delaware.

As gay men watched their friends and lovers die in increasing numbers, they organized in response. Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives (PCHA, later known as the Mazzoni Center), a health clinic founded in 1979 to serve the local lesbian and gay community, formed the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force to provide social services to those affected and offer information about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases through a local hotline. Meanwhile, social clubs like the Gay Men’s Chorus and Girlfriends Motorcycle Club joined forces to raise funds for PCHA’s education and prevention efforts.

Spread of AIDS

By the middle 1980s public health authorities recognized that the AIDS epidemic had grown beyond the communities of gay men in which doctors first identified the disease. Researchers in the United States and France had identified HIV as the cause of AIDS in 1983, and thus definitively determined that the disease could be transmitted through blood-to-blood contact, including needle-sharing among intravenous drug users, blood transfusions, and from an infected mother to her unborn child. At the same time, in cities around the country, reports showed the growing incidence of HIV and AIDS among African Americans and Latinos, particularly within networks of intravenous drug users and among their sexual partners and young children. Although those in this “second wave” of new cases had likely been infected for some time, their low access to medical care combined with the long latency period of HIV, during which time the virus spreads throughout a patient’s system but does not produce symptoms, to initially mask the prevalence of AIDS within communities of color.

In Philadelphia, by 1985 African Americans made up almost half of all reported AIDS cases, and the majority of cases among people under twenty five years old. David Fair, a longtime local gay activist and secretary-treasurer of a local predominantly Black health care workers’ union, and Rashidah Hassan, a nurse who had worked with PCHA and its AIDS Task Force, became dissatisfied with the groups’ failure to effectively reach out to African Americans at risk of contracting HIV. To stem the rising tide of new infections in Philadelphia’s Black community, in 1986 they founded Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI), one of the nation’s first Black AIDS service organizations. Perceiving that the AIDS Task Force’s efforts to reach out to the Black community had been undercut by its reputation as an all-white organization, BEBASHI representatives worked through existing social institutions like African American churches so that their education and prevention messages that would resonate with Black audiences.  In New Jersey, Project IMPACT (Intensive Mobilization to Promote AIDS Awareness through Community-based Technologies) also reached out to African American leaders in urban areas.

In 1987, as the AIDS community nationwide became frustrated with the dearth of effective treatments and President Ronald Reagan’s reticence on the epidemic, grassroots AIDS politics took a radical turn. In March, a group of New York activists founded the inaugural chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an organization whose protest actions became the public face of AIDS advocacy in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The group quickly spawned a network of chapters in cities across the country and abroad, including Philadelphia, South Jersey, and Delaware.

Dramatic Demonstrations

Members of the Philadelphia branch of ACT UP began staging theatrical “die-ins” and other dramatic demonstrations to highlight the human cost of high prescription drug prices and inadequate public health policy. To protest the Catholic Church’s opposition to condom use, in May 1991 around one hundred ACT UP Philadelphia members interrupted a prayer service for people with AIDS conducted by  Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua and tried to place wrapped condoms near his hands and feet, shouting, “These will save lives–your morals won’t.” In addition to public protests, ACT UP became well known for creating memorable visual messages to both educate people about AIDS and mobilize those affected by the epidemic. In this vein, during one holiday season the Philadelphia chapter circulated stickers featuring an HIV-positive Santa Claus with the tagline, “If only Reagan and Bush had told the truth, Santa wouldn’t have to die from AIDS.”

During the mid-1990s, ACT UP declined in national prominence as the white gay men who filled much of the organization’s ranks passed away, grew tired of activism, or gained access to the highly effective (but expensive) class of new antiretroviral drugs that became available due to advances in HIV treatment research. The Philadelphia chapter, however, remained vital due to the recruiting efforts of a core group of members, who reached out to lower-income people of color, among whom the nationwide AIDS epidemic continued to grow fastest. The changing membership in turn shaped the direction of the group’s activism, as it increasingly focused on affordable housing, HIV prevention in prisons, and access to medications for impoverished people in the United States and throughout the developing world. Working with Health GAP (Global Access Project), a coalition of AIDS activists and allied organizations, Philadelphia ACT UP members pressured the White House to move forward with a coordinated response to the worldwide AIDS pandemic.  This effort, supported by numerous AIDS action groups in Philadelphia and the Cooper Early Intervention Program in Camden, culminated in 2003 with President George W. Bush’s announcement of the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a five-year, $15 billion commitment funding HIV prevention and drug access programs in Africa. In 2008, Congress reauthorized the program through 2013, and expanded its funding to almost $48 billion.

Four Decades

As the epidemic entered its fourth decade, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health estimated that 1.3% of the city’s population was living with HIV or AIDS, about three times the national average. Center City and the surrounding area had the greatest prevalence of cases in Philadelphia County, with additional areas of high concentration in the Northeast, West Philadelphia, and around Germantown. Despite the city’s relatively large percentage of people living with HIV and AIDS, local trends reflected patterns of infection for the United States as a whole, inasmuch as the epidemic in Philadelphia disproportionately affected African Americans, and in particular men who had sex with men and women, among whom the disease was growing fastest.

Regionally, statistics collected by the Centers for Disease Control from the beginning of the epidemic through 2008 showed New Jersey ranking fifth-highest in number AIDS diagnoses among the fifty states; Pennsylvania ranking seventh; and Delaware ranking thirty-third (although in rate of cases per thousand population, Delaware ranked eighth-highest in the nation). By 2010 Philadelphia accounted for the highest proportion of AIDS cases in Pennsylvania, surpassing other counties by far (20,411 diagnosed cases from 1980 to 2010, compared with 1,098 in Montgomery County, 1,743 in Delaware County, 802 in Bucks County, and 603 in Chester County).  In South Jersey, by 2010 the disease was most prevalent in Atlantic County.

In light of these realities, activists reignited the search for an AIDS cure. In 2009 a group of veteran Philadelphia activists, many of whom had been part of ACT UP chapters around the country during the organization’s heyday, founded the AIDS Policy Project to advocate for funding and scientific research on treatments to not only slow the spread of HIV within a patient’s system, but eliminate it altogether.  In this way, Philadelphians sought to lead the way to the end of the AIDS epidemic once and for all.

Dan Royles is a Ph.D. Candidate at Temple University.  This essay is derived from his dissertation research on the political culture of African American AIDS activism. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The national ACLU grew out of curtailments of civil liberties during and after World War I. The organization’s activity in the Philadelphia region began even before formation of the local chapter, most notably when it protested bans of the film Birth of a Nation (1915) that occurred in 1921 in Philadelphia, Newark, Jersey City, and Detroit. This, along with the ACLU’s support for the free speech rights of the Ku Klux Klan, drew criticism from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its attempts to ban the film’s premiere and protect critics of the film.

The Greater Philadelphia chapter of the ACLU originated when the Citizens’ Council on Democratic Rights, a Philadelphia group devoted to the protection of individual civic freedoms, voted to affiliate with the national ACLU in late 1951. The Citizen’s Council on Democratic Rights had been involved with the controversial Loyalty Review Boards that were part of President Truman’s (1884-1972) probes into the loyalty of government employees, hosting lawyers from the national ACLU for open meetings on the subject as late as 1950. Having made the transition to ACLU affiliate status, the newly minted chapter focused on advocacy, public education, and litigation to preserve and enhance civil liberties.

Church and State Case

Under Spencer Coxe’s (1918-2011) tenure as the first full-time director, the organization’s litigator and board president Henry Sawyer (1918-1999) represented the family of Edward Schempp before the Supreme Court in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). The Schempp family disputed whether the Abington School District could require their children to read and recite the Bible in a public school setting. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Schempp family and affirmed the separation of church and state in public schools, making the case the organization’s first significant victory. The decision resulted in changes in how education was carried out across the country, with reports of policy confusion among superintendents becoming common as they struggled with the implications of the decision.

As the ACLU presence in Pennsylvania grew, the Philadelphia office worked in conjunction with other offices in the state. The Philadelphia chapter, despite opposition from community groups, was vociferous in opposing mandatory minimum sentencing for repeat offenders and for individuals who committed violent crimes on public transportation. The Philadelphia chapter’s stances on issues such as these in the early 1980s were consistent with the broader goals of the ACLU, which advocated alternatives to incarceration.

The ACLU’s positions at times placed it at odds with city and state officials and governments. During the Newark riots of 1967, for example, the New Jersey chapter documented police abuses. In 1985 the Philadelphia ACLU, in conjunction with the wider state organization, sued the City of Philadelphia for the closure of its largest homeless shelter. In Committee for Dignity and Fairness for the Homeless et al v. Pernsley the City of Philadelphia entered into a settlement, agreeing to house the homeless in compliance with the Pennsylvania State Department of Welfare’s regulations regarding their care.

Abortion-Law Challenge

More recently, the New Jersey ACLU challenged the state’s abortion laws, overturning a ban on late-term abortion in 1998 and laws requiring the consent of parents for a minor’s abortion procedure in 2000. In 2012, the organization represented residents of Newark in their case against their city’s alleged nondisclosure of plans for $100 million donated by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984) for use in the city’s public schools.

The Pennsylvania and New Jersey chapters have continued to represent citizens in cases with potential for lasting impact on civil liberties. These cases include disputes over freedom of speech, press, expression, and religion, as well as cases involving police misconduct, racial discrimination, reproductive freedom, children, immigrant and womens’ rights. The chapters operate with both staff and volunteer legal assistance and are 501c3 nonprofit organizations.

Will Caverly is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Villanova University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

At the outset of U.S. involvement in the First World War, the major branches of U.S. Quakerism created AFSC to coordinate alternative service for young Quaker men who conscientiously refused to serve in the military after being drafted under the Selective Service Act. The alternative consisted mostly of over six hundred Quaker and other pacifist volunteers reconstructing modular housing for displaced persons along the Western Front in France under the auspices of the American Red Cross. It was a version of what William James (1842-1910) had called the “moral equivalent of war,” and AFSC saw it as a chance for Quakers and other pacifists to make a positive contribution to peace instead of taking a merely negative stance against war. After the war, between 1920 and 1924, AFSC organized and directed the feeding of over five million children in Germany.

During the organization’s early years, the Philadelphia Quaker elite (professionals, educators, and business executives), with the occasional midwestern Friend, largely constituted the executive board and administrative leadership and so largely determined its mission and programs. A large contingent of early AFSC workers attended Germantown Friends Meeting. This concentration positioned AFSC on one side of theological differences between the more liberal Quakers of Philadelphia, New England, and the Mid-Atlantic and the more conservative Friends of the South, Midwest, and West. Differences rapidly grew into division, especially over AFSC’s abjuration of evangelism as an obstacle to delivering material aid and social services. As early as the mid-1920s more conservative Friends were disowning AFSC as in any way representative of American Quakerism as a whole.

Philadelphia Quaker Elite

The Philadelphia Quaker elite between the world wars was solidly middle and upper-middle-class and counted many industrial and financial executives among its ranks. These well-off Quakers generally subscribed to the middle-class Social Gospel, a liberal movement for political and economic reform whose influence on Protestantism at large had just passed its peak. Yet Philadelphia Quakers, unlike most other Friends in the country, never officially joined the major institutional expression of the Social Gospel in the United States, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC, founded in 1908). AFSC effectively fulfilled the role of the FCC for Philadelphia Quakerism; indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s AFSC often worked with the FCC on domestic projects, most notably among coal-mining families in southern Appalachia.

During World War II, AFSC (somewhat controversially) worked with representatives of the other “historic peace churches,” the Mennonites and Brethren, to administer the federally established Civilian Public Service (CPS) system of work camps for conscientious objectors. AFSC helped resettle European refugees in the United States, and by establishing a regional office (one of the first of several) in San Francisco, also protested Japanese-American internment and helped relocate over four thousand Japanese-American college students from the internment camps. In 1947, after another round of postwar feeding and service in Germany and on the strength also of its administration of prewar relief programs in Russia and Spain during those countries’ respective civil wars, AFSC (together with its British counterpart, the Friends Service Council) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Quakers worldwide.

After World War II, AFSC resolved a long-standing internal debate over what it should prioritize in its hiring: Quakerism or practical expertise. It became increasingly professionalized and soon employed a majority non-Quaker staff, moving the debate over AFSC’s Quaker identity outside the organization to liberal Quaker circles, where it raged into the twenty-first century. Also, AFSC began to focus less and less on material aid and more and more on ending military conflict and poverty in the Global South and on improving race relations and civil rights at home. AFSC started delivering aid to refugees in Gaza in 1948 at the request of the United Nations and during its ensuing decades-long presence in the Middle East distinguished itself as one of the first organizations in the United States to call for Palestinian rights. In 1958, AFSC started working in Africa as well, aiding refugees from the Algerian War. After also administering medical aid in China and food aid in India and Bengal, AFSC entered Vietnam in 1965 and (again, somewhat controversially) aided civilians on both sides of the Vietnam War. It also provided draft counseling for thousands of young men in the United States.

“Speak Truth to Power”

AFSC became perhaps most famous for coining the phrase “speak truth to power,” the title of a pamphlet it issued in 1955 advocating nonviolent resolution of international conflicts. Although the lead authors of Speak Truth to Power attributed the phrase to an eighteenth-century Friend, it originated with Bayard Rustin (1912-87), one of the pamphlet’s co-authors. Rustin was an African American Quaker civil rights leader from West Chester, Pennsylvania, and the chief organizer of the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. AFSC itself sponsored Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68) and Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) on a visit to India in 1959 to help strengthen the nonviolent African American civil rights movement’s ties to its Gandhian roots. AFSC also first published Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a stand-alone pamphlet.

In the 1970s and 1980s, AFSC protested apartheid in South Africa as well as the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the United States and around the world. In the 1990s, AFSC established a major health clinic in Haiti and, in the midst of a famine in North Korea, advised farmers in that country on how to increase food production sustainably. In 2004, AFSC continued its practice of protesting U.S. wars by curating a travelling exhibit, “Eyes Wide Open,” which displayed a pair of boots for every American soldier killed in Iraq along with shoes representing the hundreds of thousands of civilians who also died in the most recent war. In the 2010s, AFSC focused on criminal-justice and immigration reform, opposing solitary confinement (in particular) and providing legal services for immigrants.

While AFSC became a majority non-Quaker organization with offices around the United States and on four continents, Philadelphia remained the organization’s headquarters. In the twenty-first century, the Quaker values of peace, integrity, and equality continued to animate AFSC programs.

Guy Aiken holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (American Religions) from the University of Virginia and is a postdoctoral fellow at Villanova University. He has published several articles, including “The American Friends Service Committee’s Mission to the Gestapo” in Peace & Change, and “Educating Tocqueville: Jared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America” in the Tocqueville Review. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) once admitted that Philadelphians never found a better way to prevent hogs from trespassing than by blinding them, which was done by holding a red-hot knitting needle to their eyes. When encountering animals in early American history, it is far more common to uncover these stories of cruelty, rather than those of compassion. But during the eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s print culture and Quaker civic spirit made it particularly suited to begin advocating some forms of animal protection. Philadelphia had access to the transatlantic exchange of goods and ideas, and its residents were the heirs apparent to centuries’ worth of literature dedicated to the benevolent treatment of animals. Many of these European were available at the Library Company of Philadelphia for an annual membership fee of £10.

Due in large part to this literature, it became possible by the late eighteenth century to regard animals differently from the human-centered vision of earlier times. However, it was the American Revolution that transformed the treatment of animals into a moral issue deserving of attention from those who saw the Revolution as the first moment of their nation’s millennial destiny. It was in this context that many Americans attempted to reinvent their society to create a virtuous, Christianized national identity.

Animal Cruelty, Moral Sensibility

Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) was the dominant figure of this effort. Rush stressed the necessity of preparing the morals of American citizens by monitoring and correcting their behavior. Rush believed animal cruelty destroyed moral sensibility; he was so convinced of a connection between morals and humanity toward animals that he advocated laws to defend them from “outrage and oppression.”

Rush’s pleas were answered in 1788, when Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court rendered its decision in Republica v. Teischer. The defendant was accused of willfully and maliciously killing his horse. The court viewed this cruel act as destroying his moral sensibility and therefore making him unfit to be a virtuous citizen. The guilty verdict marked the first documented case of an American being convicted of animal cruelty.

This decision suggested a promising start for the institutionalized protection of animals, but it took an additional seventy-two years for the first legislation protecting animals to be passed into law in Pennsylvania in 1860. Seven years later, in 1867, Pennsylvania became the second state to charter a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. New Jersey established its own SPCA in 1868, and Delaware followed suit in 1873. The passage of new legislation and the creation of these animal welfare groups reflected the values of a growing middle class that was self-consciously kind and caring to animals.

Municipal Campaigns

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s city officials attempted to turn the city into a healthier environment. This led to increased efforts to control stray dogs and cats, who were believed to carry diseases such as rabies and poliomyelitis. The city funded killing sprees, during which dogs and cats were bludgeoned on the streets or taken to the Delaware River and summarily drowned. In 1911 alone, Philadelphia destroyed over 50,000 cats. These horrendous measures were met with resistance. The Women’s Branch of the PSPCA, based in Philadelphia, campaigned for kinder methods of control, and even built one of the nation’s first animal “shelters.”

By midcentury, the modern pet industry was in place. Although this entailed the unfortunate commodification of animal lives, it also led to the proliferation of specialized services such as medical care facilities and municipal-run shelters. The last three decades have seen a further rise in pet keeping and animal welfare groups. Yet the foundation for animal protection was laid down by historical, cultural, and legal precedents formulated during unique historical moments such as the post-Revolutionary reform movement and the reforms of the last half of the nineteenth century.  Contemporary courtroom discussions often echo language from centuries ago. For instance, a bill currently pending in Pennsylvania seeking to make it a third degree felony to “willfully and maliciously” kill or harm an animal, mirrors the language used in the 1788 Teischer decision.

Organizations such as the PSPCA, NJSPCA, and DSPCA also have their roots in the late nineteenth century. Today, these animal welfare organizations are among the most active in the nation, providing care for animals who might otherwise never receive much needed attention.  In addition to state-sponsored entities, numerous local, volunteer-based organizations have emerged in recent years. These organizations use social media to report cruelty, communicate about lost or abandoned animals, and circulate petitions. Grassroots organizations, capable of mobilizing public opinion and reaching an ever-increasing audience, create new potential for working with state-sponsored organizations to secure protection for animals in greater Philadelphia.

Bill Leon Smith is pursuing his PhD in Early American History at the College of William and Mary. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. His research focuses on the development of animal ethics and other forms of humanitarianism during the eighteenth century. Prior to William and Mary, he served as a World History teacher at Burlington Township High School, in Burlington, New Jersey. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Under Pennsylvania’s first two constitutions, ratified in 1776 and 1790, Article III limited voting rights and elections to “freemen,” but definitions of “freeman” varied in individual counties depending on local politics and traditions. Some understood the term “freeman” to apply only to whites, while others did not. The commonwealth’s western counties, which had small populations of free Blacks, tended to allow them to vote. Eastern counties with larger populations of free Blacks–especially Philadelphia–discouraged them from voting though intimidation at the polls.

Philadelphia’s free Black community, the largest and wealthiest in the state, grew in the early decades of the nineteenth century as a destination for free Blacks from the South and runaway slaves. At the same time, tension over the issue of slavery increased, especially after Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1831 and the rise of racial abolitionism in the 1830s.

The explosive issue of race relations was one of many financial, governmental, and immigration problems facing Pennsylvania when the legislature called a convention to reform the state constitution in 1837. The convention began in May 1837 in Harrisburg but moved to Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia for its concluding sessions in November 1837 and February 1838. Initially, delegates made no recommendations to alter the language of Article III to prohibit free Blacks from voting. But Democrat John Sterigere (1793-1852) of Montgomery County seized on public opinion against Black voting rights and proposed to the convention that the language of Article III be changed to include the word “white” prior to “freemen” in order to exclude all Blacks, even if they paid taxes or owned property.

Thomas Earle (1796-1849), a Democrat from Philadelphia County, objected to changing the language and attempted to persuade the convention to seek a compromise to temporarily suspend Black voting rights throughout the commonwealth. He lost to a larger Democratic majority, which approved the change to Article III and proposed a new Constitution of 1838 for ratification. Similar actions occurred in other states during this period as politicians attempted to prevent Blacks from gaining the same voting rights as white men, whose access to the polls was increasing with changes in voting qualifications such as reduced taxes or land-owning requirements.

Philadelphia’s Black community responded to Pennsylvania’s proposed constitution with the Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania. In the tradition of African American leaders such as Absalom Jones (1746-1818), Richard Allen (1760-1831), and James Forten Sr. (1766-1842), Robert Purvis emphasized the worthiness of Philadelphia’s Black community. Purvis systematically presented an argument based on history, statistical data, economics, and politics to combat public misconceptions about African Americans.

The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens invoked the founding documents of Pennsylvania and the nation to argue that it would be consistent with previous generations to ensure suffrage to freemen without the mention of a specific race. The pamphlet pointed out that during the colonial period, white indentured servants as well as Black slaves were not permitted to vote because they lacked the status of freemen. “White” was not included as a qualification for voting in either the 1776 or 1790 Pennsylvania constitutions.

To support the claims of the Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery compiled a census as evidence that Philadelphia’s Black community provided the city with revenue, laborers, and taxpayers who contributed to its economic success. The census demonstrated that compared with whites, African Americans made up a substantially lower proportion of the poor and people receiving aid. In fact, the Black community paid more to provide relief for the poor than it received in return. Purvis used the statistics to rebuke a public image of idleness. Recognizing the connection between actions in Pennsylvania and increasing racial tensions in the nation, Purvis charged the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention with having, “laid our [Black] rights a sacrifice on the altar of slavery.”

Voters ratified the Constitution of 1838 by a margin of a little more than one thousand votes—113,971 to 112,759—on October 9, 1838. African Americans continued to petition the legislature to reinstate suffrage for free Blacks, but their petitions were left unanswered. Racial tensions turned to violent riots targeting African Americans and attacks on a newly erected abolitionist meeting place, Pennsylvania Hall. Although a new generation of leaders including Jacob C. White Jr. (1837-1902) continued the fight for suffrage, African Americans in Pennsylvania did not regain the vote until the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1870) extended voting rights to Black men throughout the nation.

David Reader teaches history at Haddonfield Memorial High School and was the recipient of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship in 2007. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Founded in 1908, the association formed as a branch of the New York-based organization named for Civil War General Samuel C. Armstrong (1839-93), who led the 8^th United States Colored Troops. After the war, in 1868, Armstrong founded the Hampton Institute in Virginia as an industrial school for students of color and to produce African American teachers. The Armstrong Association raised funds for the Hampton Institute and for Tuskegee University in Alabama, founded in 1881 by one of Hampton Institute’s most famous graduates, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915).

Philadelphia’s Armstrong Association began after Hampton educator John Thompson Emlen (1878-1955), who was part of the organization in New York, came to Philadelphia intent on bettering the conditions for African Americans. He believed that a branch of the Armstrong Association could supplement existing social institutions to address the needs of a steadily growing population of African Americans migrating from the South (a trend later termed the Great Migration). After a meeting between Emlen and Richard R. Wright Jr. (1878-1967), a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia branch began its work.

Originally, the Armstrong Association consisted primarily of wealthy white philanthropists, but Emlen believed that an interracial board was key to the organization’s success. Each position on the board had two appointees: a white person as well as an African American. Emlen served as the organization’s secretary, and Wright acted as field secretary.

Joining forces with the Philadelphia Housing Association and the Traveler’s Aid Society, the Armstrong Association studied living conditions and overcrowding during the Great Migration as African Americans flocked to northern cities seeking economic opportunities and better social conditions. In 1900, the African American population of Philadelphia was 63,000. By 1910, it had grown to 84,459 and within another ten years it surpassed 134,000.  In addition to a housing shortage, new arrivals found it difficult to find employment, especially in their previous fields. Wright, who earned his doctorate in sociology, noted in his dissertation that many African American migrants to Philadelphia were skilled laborers, but they often faced discrimination from employers and had to take jobs outside their skill sets. In response, the Armstrong Association developed initiatives such as an annual job fair, reports to monitor working conditions of African Americans, and representation in cases of workplace disputes.

Using the Thomas Durham Public School at Sixteenth and Lombard Streets as a case study, the organization created a learning and social center to help African Americans with job placement and skill assessments. The school, named for a former administrator in the Philadelphia School District, was established in 1910 and served a predominantly African American student body.  In a study, the Armstrong Association found that only 53 of the 163 students of working age were able to secure work. Those who did found occupations that required very little skill and no room for advancement and provided a poor living wage. The Armstrong Association determined that providing students with better vocational training would prepare them to enter the workforce.

The association also provided job placement services for African American migrants, documented by oral history interviews conducted in the 1980s by historian Charles Hardy. The association’s industrial secretary, Alexander L. Manly (1866-1944), who joined the organization in 1913, secured more than $35,000 in contracts for African Americans within his first eight months in the position. Despite racial discrimination, the organization succeeded in aiding many newcomers searching for employment.

Emlen spent the remainder of his career in public service with the organization, while Wright left the group in 1909 because he favored self-help over the Armstrong Association’s emphasis on philanthropy. Wright later became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Armstrong Association of Philadelphia went on to affiliate with the National Urban League in a merger that created the Urban League of Philadelphia in 1957. Through its work, the Armstrong Association of Philadelphia helped a generation of African Americans who migrated from the South find housing and employment in their new city.

Sharece Blakney is a graduate student in American History at Rutgers-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

During the early colonial period, up until the mid-1760s, the town economy of Philadelphia built on the contributions of artisans and entrepreneurs. Artisan shops produced shoes, soap, wagons, clothes and food for the town, while also laying bricks and constructing buildings. By 1745, master artisans made up 48 percent of the total population of Philadelphia, highlighting their significance to the burgeoning town. For artisans of this period, the home and workshop were very often in the same building or at the least in close proximity. In some cases, master artisans labored alone to complete specific orders for their customers, but in many cases they relied on the work of indentured servants, slaves, and a few skilled journeymen to assist in the completion of their tasks. Master artisans were respected throughout the city, due in large part to the vital goods they provided the community, but also for the independence of their craft.

By the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) the labor market had changed dramatically to favor free laborers over indentured servants, whose availability had declined. Typically, then, master artisans owned the shop, ordered supplies, supervised the workers, and continued to work alongside his employees, including apprentices and journeymen. Apprentices were traditionally teenagers who spent three to seven years learning their craft under their masters, from whom they could expect room, board, and education. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one they would be promoted to journeymen status, given a set of tools, a suit, and a wage. Journeymen were skilled workers who performed their work with little interference from the master and received pay by the day or by piece. Tradesmen viewed this system of labor as a type of fluid hierarchy in which apprentices would someday climb the artisanal ladder, from journeymen to master and proprietor of their own shops.

Masters, Journeymen, Apprentices

The relationship between master artisans, journeyman, and apprentices was initially built on mutual respect, and master artisans took a paternal role over their laborers. Work was performed at a casual pace and on a per customer basis. Workers wore leather aprons, shared workbenches, and worked with hand tools to construct their goods. The workday was long, traditionally twelve to fourteen hours, but consisted of morning breaks for coffee and beer, a lunch break in the early afternoon, and a late afternoon break for a snack. Overall, artisans within Philadelphia strove for “competence,” the ability to provide enough money to support their families and save a little for the future, but few master artisans were actually able to reach this level of economic comfort.

The end of the Seven Years’ War also brought implementation of imperial acts by Britain on the colonies. These acts served as a blessing for many struggling Philadelphia artisans because many of them did not tax home-produced goods. As Philadelphians used the policies of nonimportation, or the boycotting of British goods, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the purchase of home-produced goods brought increased business to Philadelphia artisans. Nonimportation pitted artisans against merchants who benefited from Atlantic trade with Britain, but these differences were largely cast aside once war broke out. During the War for Independence, Philadelphia artisans enjoyed a period of production with little competition. This did not last long, for when the war ended and Atlantic trading resumed, artisans found themselves once again competing against foreign goods. During the postrevolutionary years, they joined merchants in seeking a stronger central government that would protect the nation’s domestic industries.

Dramatic Shifts After the Revolution

The postrevolutionary years also brought dramatic shifts to the relationship between master artisans, journeymen, and apprentices. By the 1780s masters no longer signed contracts with apprentices promising tools, clothes, or an education, but instead replaced these items with monetary compensation. Masters refrained from teaching apprentices the art of the craft and instead tended to rely on them as simple wage laborers. The increased presence of under-trained workers within their craft angered many journeymen, as did other changes within their labor environment. As work customs changed to meet new market obligations, such as fewer breaks, more oversight, less autonomy at work, and decreased wages, journeymen perceived their interests diverging from that of their masters, and they began to doubt their ability to climb the artisanal ladder. Such changes strained the relationship between masters and journeymen. Perceiving master artisans as no longer producing for a community, fulfilling their paternal obligations, or striving to reach “competence,” journeymen came to view their master’s intentions as a threat to the social and economic order of society and at odds with the true and moral intentions of labor.

The first sign of dissension emerged in 1786 during one of the nation’s first strikes—the first recorded strike in Philadelphia’s history—as journeymen printers went on strike against employers refusing to pay a weekly rate of six dollars. Further divisions became apparent during the 1788 Federal Procession, which honored the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, when at least two trades marched in separate companies, one of master artisans and one of journeymen. By the 1790s early labor disputes between these two groups sprung up in a number of crafts, including carpenters in 1791 and cabinetmakers in 1795. Tensions between these two groups continued after the turn of the century as revolutions in transportation, communication, and industrialization greatly expanded the market economy well beyond Philadelphia, giving priority, in the eyes of journeymen, to the market over the moral intentions of craft labor.

While artisans played a significant role in crafting Philadelphia’s colonial and pre-Revolutionary economic and social history, divisiveness within artisanal ranks also played a large role in shaping Philadelphia’s post-Revolutionary history. As markets continued to expand throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the divide between master artisans and journeymen grew. Many master artisans left the workshop and became simply business owners, merchants, and entrepreneurs. Journeymen continued to toil in the workplace, but it was as wage laborers, and work was most likely performed at a machine and no longer at a workbench. As friction between these two developed into the 1820s journeymen laborers responded with the formation of trades unions and political parties to fight their cause, which set up a nearly thirty-year period of labor and class unrest within Philadelphia.

Patrick Grubbs is a Ph.D. candidate at Lehigh University who is writing his dissertation entitled “The Duty of the State: Policing the State of Pennsylvania from the Coal and Iron Police to the Establishment of the Pennsylvania State Police Force, 1866 – 1905.” He has been employed at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, since 2009 and has taught Pennsylvania history there since 2011. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The movement began in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman (b. 1983), a white vigilante, for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Three Black women, Alicia Garza (b. 1981), Patrisse Cullors (b. 1984), and Opal Tometi (b.1984), originated the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media. The hashtag initiated protests the next year following the killings of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner (1970-2014) in New York City at the hands of police officers. Subsequently, between 2014 and 2016 Black Lives Matter exploded into a national network of organizations, including the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the Dream Defenders, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, among many others. In August 2014 organizers in St. Louis issued a call for Black activists to take part in the Black Life Matters Freedom Ride. Started by Cullors, this ride took place on August 28 when about thirty activists from New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey traveled by bus from New York City to Ferguson, Missouri, and attended ongoing protests there.

Philadelphia’s chapter of Black Lives Matter formed through the work of community activists Azsherae Gary (b.1988) and Taylor Johnson-Gordon (b.1988) in 2015. The first meeting, in May, focused on the initiatives of abolition of police and educational justice. The local group also supported the #AiyanasDreams annual campaign, named after seven-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, who died at the hands of the Detroit Police Department Special Response Team on May 16, 2010. The campaign emphasized that although Black women and girls constituted only 13 percent of the population, they made up a third of police killings of all women.

The George Floyd Protests

In 2020, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the Philadelphia chapter of BLM led mass protests that resulted in multiple clashes with police and numerous arrests. Philadelphia police, often clad in riot gear, arrested over two hundred people on May 30, the majority for breaking a city-imposed curfew or failing to disperse.  On June 1, police responded to marchers on the Vine Street Expressway with pepper spray and tear gas. Similar to protests in New York City and Portland, Oregon, officials in the city brought in the National Guard to quell protests. In June 2020, BLM Philly and eleven other organizations in the Black Philly Radical Collective, announced thirteen demands to the city of Philadelphia. They wanted police departments defunded and abolished, the release of political prisoners, and economic justice, among other demands. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania later criticized the police response in Philadelphia as “overwhelming, racially-targeted, and excessive,” and subsequent lawsuits cost the city settlements totaling $9.25 million.

BLM protests during the summer of 2020 also sparked calls to remove statues in several American cities on the basis that the monuments represented an erasure of the harm done by white supremacy. In Philadelphia, protesters tried to topple the statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91). A former police commissioner, to many Rizzo represented a legacy of racial intolerance and oppression tied to past police violence, his call for Philadelphians to “vote white” in the 1970s, and the 1978 police standoff with the Black liberation group MOVE. Efforts to remove the Rizzo statue began in 2017, but it was not taken down until June 2020. Black Lives Matter actions that year also included murals painted in cities with historic Black communities. In Camden, New Jersey, a mural painted on Broadway covered four blocks of the city. The momentum from the summer of protests also hastened placement of a marker at Cooper Poynt commemorating a site where enslaved Africans were bought and sold.

The Camden Scenario

While BLM Philly protested in their city and were met by police in riot gear, in Camden Police Chief Joseph Wysocki (b. 1970) marched with protesters over the murder of George Floyd. This reflected changed police-community relations forged in Camden during the previous decade. The city had a long history of community organizing amid an ineffective relationship with police. In 1967, Charles “Poppy” Sharp (1932-99) founded the Black People’s Unity Movement, which tackled the power structure and police brutality in the city. Elmer Winston (1925-2006) helped found and run the Camden Neighborhood Renaissance Organization. Camden residents, many of them elderly, formed block patrols, challenged drug dealers, and improved their community on their terms. In 2012, when murder rates were eighteen times the national average and scores of excessive-force complaints were lodged against police, the residents, City Council, and mayor joined together to dissolve the Camden Police Department and replace it in 2013 with a countywide department. Homicides decreased from sixty-seven in 2012 to twenty-five in 2019, with only three excessive force complaints in 2020.

The results of Camden’s new policing system predated the Black Lives Matter movement but came to the forefront during BLM protests in 2020 amid calls to defund the police. Camden showcased an example of how community-led policing could change a city’s trajectory in the wake of a worldwide reckoning with police brutality and anti-Blackness.

Gwendolyn Fowler is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she studies African American and Women’s and Gender History. Her research focuses on the welfare rights movement in the United States. She is currently researching the Westside Mothers of Detroit, Michigan. Her dissertation is titled, tentatively, “Without Mother You’d Have No People: Mother Power and Welfare Rights in the Motor City.” (Author information current at time of publication.)

Many advocates of Black Power had ties to the civil rights movement, but during the 1960s they diverged from its nonviolent stance and emphasized Black identity and empowerment through anti-poverty programs, self-defense, and diasporic connections with other oppressed people. Black Power stressed that Black people should be in control of Black communities. In Philadelphia, early Black Power initiatives included projects to raise awareness of African and African American history and culture, including the Freedom Library on Ridge Avenue in North Philadelphia, opened in 1964 by John Churchville (b. 1941). Churchville and other activists who gathered at Freedom Library formed Philadelphia’s first Black Power political organization, the Black People’s Unity Movement (BPUM), in 1965. An organization by the same name formed in Camden, New Jersey, in 1967.

In North Central Philadelphia, the Church of the Advocate, with a congregation becoming increasingly African American as whites moved out of the city, became an important center of Black Power. Under the leadership of Father Paul Washington (1921-2002), one of the Freedom Library activists, the church and BPUM hosted a Black Unity Rally in February 1966 that drew a capacity crowd to hear civil rights leader Julian Bond (1940-2015). Black Power rallies followed in locations around the city during the summer, including two attended by Stokely Carmichael (1941-98). In 1968, the Church and BPUM also hosted the Third National Conference on Black Power, attended by two thousand people and leading to the creation of the Advocate Community Development Corporation and a Black activist newspaper, Voice of Umoja.

Church of the Advocate members included Reggie Schell (1941-2012), who in 1969 became the defense minister (leader) of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers originally formed in 1966 in Oakland, California, to patrol and protect African American neighborhoods from police brutality. In Philadelphia, under Schell’s leadership the local chapter expanded from its base in North Philadelphia to become influential throughout the city through a “Free Food for Survival” program, education programs, rallies, and other political events. The Black Power movement also spread to the region’s college campuses, where sit-ins called for Black faculty and Black studies programs, and to high schools. Activism focused especially on control of the Philadelphia public schools. When Black students from a dozen Philadelphia high schools marched on a Philadelphia Board of Education meeting on November 17, 1967, with demands including Black history classes taught by Black teachers, many wore Black Power buttons.

The rising tide of Black activism and militancy so alarmed the Philadelphia Police Department that even the students marching on the school board were met with nightstick-wielding officers, commanded by then-commissioner and future mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91). Police raided homes of Black Power activists and offices of organizations, and many local activists were followed by FBI agents from COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program that aimed to infiltrate U.S. political organizations, including the Black Panther Party. (COINTELPRO was discovered in 1971, when activists raided the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI.)

On August 31, 1970, shortly before a Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention held at Temple University and following a shooting of a white police officer by an African American man, Philadelphia police raided three Black Panther Party headquarters, including one near the campus on Columbia Avenue. The raids became internationally known for their brutality and visibility. Panther members were held at gunpoint and many were publicly strip-searched before being taken to the police station. The bail for the Panthers was set at $100,000, but it was posted by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends. The raids, ordered by Rizzo, did much to unite the NAACP and other stalwarts of the nonviolent civil rights movement with the Panthers. Although not entirely aligned politically, many Philadelphia activists united in their opposition to police brutality.

Despite the raids, the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention took place as scheduled at Temple University’s McGonigle Hall in September 1970. The convention drew fourteen thousand participants, including Black Panther Party leaders from across the country, to hear speakers including Huey Newton (1942-89). Activists gathered to draft a new constitution and attend workshops at the event, which the Black Panther Party declared successful. Many attendees, primarily women, felt differently and critiqued the masculinity and misogyny apparent in many of the activities. Still, the convention was one of the largest gatherings of radical activists in the United States.  

Although the Black Panther Party declined in influence in the early 1970s, many activists turned their interests toward diasporic connections and global injustice. Black Power activists in Philadelphia, for example, founded the Philadelphia Coalition to Stop Rhodesian and South African Imports to protest apartheid in South Africa. By the early 1970s, the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party disbanded but Reggie Schell and other local Panthers started the Black United Liberation Front, which continued much of their activism.

The legacy of the Black Power activism lived on among other Philadelphia organizations and individuals. Black Power activism changed Philadelphia-area politics by making issues important to African Americans central to local governance and, eventually, by electing movement veterans to office. W. Wilson Goode (b. 1938), a West Philadelphia community organizer, became managing director of Philadelphia and then the first of three African American mayors, serving from 1984 to 1992. Other veterans of the Black Power movement gained seats in the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

Although many have cited the disbanding of the Black Panther Party and the pursuit of prominent Black Power activists by law enforcement as a failure of the movement, the Black Power movement left an important legacy in Philadelphia and across the country. The Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia remained active in community-centered actions and social justice work, hosting a daily soup kitchen and youth programming. Prominent Philadelphia Black Panthers included Mumia Abu-Jamal (b. 1954), who joined the Black Panther Party at fourteen and became the local chapter’s “lieutenant of Information.” His incarceration for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner (1955-81) and assertions of an unfair trial prompted global activism on his behalf. While imprisoned, Abu-Jamal became a vocal writer and activist for the rights of incarcerated people. Activists also pursued the release of jailed members of MOVE, the black nationalist and anarcho-primitivist organization famously bombed by Philadelphia police in a 1985 standoff at a MOVE compound in West Philadelphia.

In both city government and radical activism across Philadelphia, the teachings and legacy of Black Power in Philadelphia remained prevalent. The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s created the space for continued activism and political presence for African Americans in Philadelphia.

Holly Genovese is a Ph.D. student in history and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Temple University. Her interests are in incarceration, public history, and Black Power. She is Contributing Editor at Auntie Bellum Magazine and a contributor at Book Riot, Rabble Lit, and the Us Society for Intellectual Historians blog. Her writing has been featured in Bustle, The Establishment, and Scalawag Magazine. (Author information current at time of publication.)