In tandem with its companion volume, The Fugitive Blacksmith and Other Essential Writings by James W.C. Pennington, this collection of new essays seeks to recover and reappraise James W.C. Pennington (1808-1870), a truly remarkable figure of Black intellectual and political history who is unjustly overlooked today. Written by an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, these essays illuminate different parts of Pennington's life and career after esca...

The story of James W.C. Pennington who was a former slave, then a Yale scholar, minister, and international leader of the Antebellum abolitionist movement. He escaped from slavery aged 19 in 1827 and soon became one of the leading voices against slavery before the Civil War. In 1837 he was ordained as a priest after studying at Yale and was soon traveling all over the world as an anti-slavery advocate.

By the early 1850s, the former slave James W.C. Pennington had become an internationally prominent African American minister, abolitionist and reformer. With its scathing analysis of the chattel system, gripping account of his escape, and inspirational story of self-education and conversion to an activist faith, Pennington's autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849), found readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Pennington's second major work, A Text Book of the Origin and ...

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book AwardThough not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mc...