James W. C. Pennington

James William Charles Pennington was born into slavery on a plantation in Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1807. He was trained as a blacksmith and farrier on the plantation. He escaped at age twenty in October 1827, walking north across Maryland and Pennsylvania to free territory.

He educated himself, attended Yale Divinity School from 1834 (he was permitted to audit classes but never matriculated, on the explicit grounds of his race), and was ordained Congregational minister in 1838. He pastored congregations in Hartford and New York, became one of the principal Black voices on the abolitionist lecture circuit, and in 1849 — twenty-two years after his escape — received the honorary doctorate of divinity from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He was the first African American to receive an honorary doctorate from any European university.

His book A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People (1841) was the first published history of African Americans written by an African American. It anticipated by sixty years W. E. B. Du Bois's foundational sociological work on Black America; Du Bois acknowledged Pennington in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade.

He was active in the negotiations that produced the founding of the Liberian government in 1847, served as ambassador-at-large for the cause of fugitive-slave rights in Britain during 1849, and personally negotiated his own legal emancipation through a purchase by British abolitionists in 1851 — twenty-four years after he had escaped — so that he could return safely to the United States under the new Fugitive Slave Act.

He died in Jacksonville, Florida, on the twenty-second of October 1870, age sixty-three.

He is honored here as the fugitive minister whose history was the first written by his people of themselves.