Early Life and Education
Parker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a slave mother and white father. Born into slavery, at the age of eight John was forced to walk to Richmond, where he was sold to a doctor from Mobile, Alabama. While working in the doctor's house as a domestic servant, John was taught to read and write by the doctor's family, although the law forbade slaves' being educated. During his apprenticeship in a foundry, John attempted escape and had conflicts with officials. He asked one of the doctor's patients, a widow, to purchase him. She enabled him to hire out to earn money, and he purchased his freedom from her for $1,800 in 1845. He earned the money through his work in two of Mobile's iron foundries and occasional odd jobs.
Read more about this topic: John Parker (abolitionist)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“But she is early up and out,
To trim the year or strip its bones;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes—learning how to close the door on it when ordinary life intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it’s time to start writing again—that I’m not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.”
—Anne Tyler (b. 1941)
“One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)