Robert Purvis

Robert Purvis was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, on the fourth of August 1810, the second of three sons of William Purvis, a wealthy British-born cotton broker from Northumberland, and Harriet Judah, a free woman of color. It was through Harriet's parents that the family's remarkable lineage ran: her mother, Dido Badaraka, had been born in Morocco and carried into slavery as a child before winning her freedom, while her father, Baron Judah, was a Charleston merchant of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish descent. From this confluence of African, Moorish, and Jewish blood, Robert Purvis drew a lifelong pride and an unbending sense of justice.

His father moved the family north, and young Robert was educated in Philadelphia and briefly at Amherst Academy. Fair enough in complexion to have passed for white, he refused ever to disavow his people, declaring his cause bound to theirs. In 1833, still in his early twenties, he stood among the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society alongside William Lloyd Garrison, and he helped establish the Library Company of Colored Persons to lift up Black learning.

Purvis became the principal organizer of the Underground Railroad in the antebellum North. He founded and led the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, and later chaired the reorganized General Vigilance Committee from 1852 to 1857, giving direct aid to men and women fleeing bondage. He made his home in Byberry a station on the road to freedom, and by his own accounting helped thousands escape. From 1845 to 1850 he served as president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1832 he married Harriet Davy Forten, daughter of the eminent sailmaker James Forten, joining two of the nation's foremost Black abolitionist families. Together they raised eight children and gave their fortune and their household to the freedom struggle. He lived to see slavery abolished and died in Philadelphia on the fifteenth of April 1898, the last surviving founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Let his name stand as a lasting testament to a life spent purchasing others' liberty with his own.