Happy Birthday to African American activist and abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond (b. June 6, 1826, in Salem, Massachusetts). She boldly challenged segregation in Massachusetts and was banned from a local church for refusing to sit in a segregated section. In 1856 she launched her first antislavery lecture tour, traveling through New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and making her first international speaking appearance in Canada. She left the United States for Europe in 1859 and established herself as an antislavery lecturer in England, where she publicly criticized British treatment of Black people. In sharp contrast to her difficulties making her activist voice heard in the U.S., her work was very popular in Europe. As historian Sibyl Ventress Brownlee writes, Remond’s freedom struggle work encompassed her “campaign for equal rights for free blacks, her undaunting efforts to seek support for the emancipation of slaves, and her personal need to distance herself from patriarchal institutions reflected in antebellum American society and her own family structure.”
Citations: Sibyl Ventress Brownlee, “Out of the Abundance of the Heart: Sarah Ann Parker Remond’s Quest for Freedom (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1997), 1, 8, 103, 110-111, 120, 148, https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1858&context=dissertations_1.
Σχόλια