Abolitionism
Scroll for moreBlack abolitionists and their white allies risked their lives to end slavery in America.
On December 12, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, making slavery illegal except as punishment for crime and ending the system of racialized chattel slavery. This was largely made possible by the abolitionist movement. Led by generations of Black advocates joined by some white allies, abolitionists worked persistently to end slavery in the face of institutional opposition and widespread and violent resistance.
David Walker, a free African American abolitionist from Boston, published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in September 1829. The pamphlet demanded the immediate emancipation of the enslaved and called on free and enslaved Black people to actively fight against racial oppression and the institution of slavery. Walker’s Appeal also warned white Americans who were complicit in racial oppression that their “destruction is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you repent.”
Afraid and enraged, Southern white authorities branded the pamphlet dangerous and destroyed all copies found within their borders, and the State of Georgia offered a bounty for Mr. Walker’s capture. The next fall, North Carolina passed two laws banning the dissemination of any publication with the tendency to inspire revolution or resistance among enslaved or free Black people. Georgia and Mississippi legalized use of the death penalty against free Black people caught spreading anti- slavery materials. And multiple state legislatures prohibited anyone from teaching Black people to read. Anti-slavery publications persisted, including Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper and white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.
The Mississippi legislature reacted to the 1831 rebellion in Virginia led by enslaved preacher Nat Turner by barring any African American person, free or enslaved, from becoming a preacher, and the city of Mobile, Alabama, banned gatherings of more than three enslaved people. Anti- slavery sentiment and activity continued to grow in the North, where free Black people began organizing annual abolition conventions in 1830.
In response, the South intensified efforts to suppress abolition. On two different occasions in 1854, white “slave patrollers” in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, burned enslaved Black people alive on suspicion of possessing anti-slavery materials. After white abolitionist John Brown led a biracial, armed raid at Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia in an attempt to overthrow slavery, he was hanged for treason on December 2, 1859.
The abolition of slavery after the Civil War was made possible by many Black leaders and others who risked their safety and lost their lives to stand against the denial of their humanity. “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation,” said Frederick Douglass in 1857, “are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”