The Free African Society was founded in Philadelphia in April 1787, the first black mutual aid society in the city. The leaders were Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, free blacks whose goal was to create a non-denominational religious organization to serve the spiritual, economic and social needs of Philadelphia's African-American community. Other leaders, all free blacks, were Samuel Baston, Joseph Johnson, Cato Freedman, Caesar Cranchell, James Potter and William White. The treasurer and clerk of the FAS was Joseph Clarke, a European-American Quaker, and the Society intended to continue to use Quakers for this position.
Read more about Free African Society: History, Later Years, Preamble and Articles of The Association
Famous quotes containing the words free, african and/or society:
“Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“The soldier here, as everywhere in Canada, appeared to be put forward, and by his best foot. They were in the proportion of the soldiers to the laborers in an African ant-hill.... On every prominent ledge you could see England’s hands holding the Canadas, and I judged from the redness of her knuckles that she would soon have to let go.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)