Women are organizing to fund raise for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, a moment when our city and our nation will be at the center of an international stage. The United States will be celebrating 100 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The country has just survived a bloody Civil War and is in the middle of Reconstruction. But questions remain about whose country this is anyway, who has the right to lead, and whose role it is to serve. Black American women in Philadelphia have some very clear ideas about that, but they don’t always agree on how best to achieve their goals within the narrow options that are available.

This story is about Philadelphia in the 1870s, but it remains relevant today. It’s about inclusion, what it means to be an American citizen, and whose histories matter. For those in positions of power, for those talking about being “inclusive,” this story has some powerful lessons for us today.

Links:

Find out more and see a full bibliography and additional images in the companion blog for this episode at https://foundinphiladelphia.com/.

You can attend actor Shav’on Smith’s “Tea with Frederick Douglass” event at the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion at https://ebenezermaxwellmansion.org/tea-with-frederick-douglass/

Please participate in the Found in Philadelphia podcast survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y23Q8S5

And for some additional visuals for this episode, you can check out the podcast on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/found.in.philadelphia/

The post Episode No. 7 – Women and the Centennial first appeared on Found in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, 1867. A 21-year-old Black woman was recently appointed principal of a new public school on a small alley in the Seventh Ward. This woman is Caroline Le Count, and she will go on to build the largest Philadelphia public school with an all Black student body, and an all Black teaching staff. But Le Count’s successful experiment will be short lived, and we are still living with the consequences of that fallout today.

In the years following the Civil War, Philadelphia invested in its public school system and developed new types of schools. We might recognize some of these today. They included “normal” schools for training teachers, industrial schools for the skilled trades, select magnet high schools, and night schools for adults.

Pioneering African-American educators saw an opportunity to create good public schools for the Black community as well. They knew that all Black schools were needed in order to create jobs for Black teachers, who could not teach at all white, or mixed schools. The educator activist, Caroline Le Count, dedicated her career to establishing one of these all Black schools, and to fiercely defending and advocating for her fellow Black, public school teachers. This is the second of two episodes that looks at Le Count’s legacy in public education and what we can learn from it.

Links:
Please participate in the Found in Philadelphia podcast survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y23Q8S5

You can attend Shav’on Smith’s “Tea with Frederick Douglass” event at the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion at https://ebenezermaxwellmansion.org/tea-with-frederick-douglass/

Find out more and see a full bibliography and additional images in the companion blog for this episode at https://foundinphiladelphia.com/.

And for some additional visuals for this episode, you can check out the podcast on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/found.in.philadelphia/

The post Episode No. 6 – Philadelphia Public Schools and Caroline Le Count: Part 2 first appeared on Found in Philadelphia.

In this city, there are very different educational opportunities for the wealthy and the poor. But reformers and activists are trying to find ways to provide an education for all children.  It is the beginning of a colossal and imperfect experiment in publicly-funded schools in nineteenth-century Philadelphia.

One group in particular, Black Philadelphians, was determined not to be left out of this educational experiment. They undertook studies to understand in detail the state of education in their community. And they invested in training a new generation of teachers, who were ready to take charge in the years following the Civil War. Some of the best and brightest worked to create quality schools for Black children within this emerging public school system. One of these educators and activists was the formidable Caroline Le Count. This episode is part of a series on Le Count, this late-nineteenth century educator and activist. It is the first of two episodes that will look at Le Count’s legacy in public education.

Find out more and see a full bibliography in the companion blog for this episode at https://foundinphiladelphia.com/. And for some additional visuals for this episode, you can check out the podcast on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/found.in.philadelphia/

The post Episode No. 5 – Philadelphia Public Schools and Caroline R. Le Count: Part 1 first appeared on Found in Philadelphia.

A city at war with a not-so-distant enemy, hospitals overwhelmed and spilling over into temporary tents, nurses asking citizens to donate critical supplies, it’s Philadelphia in 1863.

Philadelphia was central to the Union war machine during the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean it was a bastion of abolitionist sentiment. As the war exposes deep inequality in the city, some citizens see an opportunity to push for change on the streets of Philadelphia. So, even as the city is organizing and mobilizing for the war effort to the south, the city’s own streetcars are becoming the frontlines of a battle for civil rights. Philadelphia’s Black women are putting their bodies on the line in this fight. And like any battle, there is violence, murder, and those left to carry on.

This episode is the second in a three-part series on the life of one of these women, Caroline Le Count. Find out more in the companion blog post to this episode at https://foundinphiladelphia.com/. And if you enjoyed the episode, I’d love it if you left a review in your podcast app.

The post Episode No. 4 – The Life and Times of Caroline R. Le Count: Part 2 first appeared on Found in Philadelphia.

An important moment of the Civil Rights movement happened right here in Philadelphia, and it took place nearly 100 years earlier than the well-known demonstrations of the twentieth century.

Philadelphia in the 1860s was a city on the move. The city was growing fast and developing new city-wide services, but progress wasn’t being felt equally by all of its residents. Philadelphia’s free Black population was discriminated against and was excluded from the city’s progress. In response, Black residents of the Seventh Ward established their own system of schools, banks, libraries, and healthcare. However, during the turmoil of the Civil War, Black residents seized the moment to upend the status quo in Philadelphia. The battlefront was on the streets of Philly, and those in the front lines were Black women, ready for the fight.   

This episode is the first in a three-part series on the life of one of those women, Caroline Le Count. Find out more in the companion blog post to this episode at https://foundinphiladelphia.com/

The post Episode No. 3 – The Life and Times of Caroline R. Le Count: Part 1 first appeared on Found in Philadelphia.

Early colonial Philadelphia was a place of contention. Colonists

Find out more at https://foundinphiladelphia.com/

The post Episode No. 2 – The Aftermath of the Germantown Protest first appeared on Found in Philadelphia.

I became interested in the story of the Germantown Protest of 1688 after hearing about it on another podcast, the “Seeing White” series by the Scene on Radio podcast. I highly recommend the entire series, but “Episode 33: Made in America” was where I first heard about the Germantown Protest. I was surprised that I had never heard of it before, being a Philadelphia history nerd. So, of course, I rushed to the internet and quickly found all of the fascinating threads of this story. How the writers were there at the very beginning of Penn’s colony. How they founded Germantown after facing religious intolerance in Europe for generations. How their search for the true way, the right way, to live led them to join one religious splinter group and then another. How angry they were when the Quaker’s colony of Pennsylvania fell short of their dreams by allowing African slavery to thrive here. And how the Protest itself somehow survived and was now in the archives of Haverford College. 

The “Seeing White” series also connected me to Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racism in America. While Kendi does not delve into the backstory of the Protest, he does put it into context within the history of anti-racist ideas in America. I would also highly recommend Stamped from the Beginning for providing the reader with a pair of magical glasses that allow you to see his three proposed historical trends throughout American history: anti-racism, assimilationist theories, and straight up racism. You’ll start seeing these trends everywhere, maybe even in your own personal beliefs. Kendi contends that anti-racist activists have had to fight against not only racism, but also assimilationist ideas, which might be well-meaning but still perpetuate racist thinking. 

My pursuit of the Germantown Protest story took me across war-torn northern Europe in the 1600s, where I discovered the violent histories of the Mennonites and Amish, and all of the other splinter groups they formed. It made me completely revise my preconceived notions about these religious groups, who are still a large part of central Pennsylvania culture. You need to take a look at the Martyr’s Mirror, a seminal publication for both Mennonites and Amish, which was first published in 1660, to understand how religious persecution, defiance, and radicalism helped define these groups. While we might think of them as somewhat old-fashioned today, they were well-organized, white-hot radicals of their day, and were just starting to be tolerated by the end of the seventeenth century.  

As I pursued the different threads of the Germantown Protest story, I kept running into the work of historian Katherine Gerbner. She was everywhere I went, answering the questions that I had, following in the footsteps of the writers of the Protest, and giving this story a fresh perspective. This episode owes a great deal to her research. And if you were shocked to learn that Pennsylvania’s Quaker founders were slave owners who profited from the slave trade, Gerbner has been working on that history too. Her recent book, Christian Slavery, tackles the complicity of Protestantism with slavery across the Atlantic world. This episode only scratches the surface of that story. 

Bibliography:

Beiler, Rosalind J. “Dissenting Religious Communication Networks and Migration, 1660-1710. ” Bernard Bailyn ed. Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1825 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009): pages unknown. 

Butler, Jon. “‘Gospel Order Improved’: The Keithian Schism and the Exercise of Quaker Ministerial Authority in Pennsylvania.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 1974, pp. 431–452. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1921631. 

Frost, J. William. “George Fox’s Ambiguous Anti-slavery Legacy.” Quakers & Slavery website,  http://web.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/quakersandslavery/commentary/people/fox.php, accessed 3/31/19. Reprinted from New Light on George Fox (1624-1691). Edited by Michael Mullett. York, England: William Sessions, 1994, pp. 69-88. 

Gerber, Katharine. “Antislavery in Print: The Germantown Protest, the ‘Exhortation,” and the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Debate on Slavery.” Early American Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2011, pp. 552–575. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23546669. 

Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 

Gerbner, Katharine. “’We are Against the Traffik of Men-Body’: The Germantown Quaker Protest of 1688 and the Origins of American Abolitionism.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, vol. 74, no. 2, 2007, pp. 149–172. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27778768. 

Hull, William I. William Penn and the Dutch Quaker Migration to Pennsylvania. Pickle Partners Publishing, Sep 3, 2018. 

Johnson, Hildegard Binder. “The Germantown Protest of 1688 against Negro Slavery.” Monatshefte, vol. 80, no. 3, 1988, pp. 268–277. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30161607. 

James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. London: Allison & Busby, 1980. 

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2016. 

Kotowski, Peter B. “The Best Poor Man’s Country?: William Penn, Quakers, and Unfree Labor in Atlantic Pennsylvania.” (Loyola University Thesis, 2016). Dissertations 2138. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2138 

Onion, Rebecca. “’Caveat Emptor!’: The First Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Published in New England.” Slate,  May 22, 2015. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/05/history-of-slavery-in-the-united-states-samuel-sewall-s-the-selling-of-joseph.html. 

Pennypacker, Samuel. The Settlement of Germantown, Pennsylvania, and the beginning of German emigration to North America. Philadelphia, PA: William J. Campbell, 1899. https://archive.org/stream/settlementofgerm01penn/settlementofgerm01penn_djvu.txt 

Sachse, Julius Friedrich. Letters Relating to the Settlement of Germantown in Pennsylvania, 1683-4, From the Könneken Manuscript in the Ministerial Archive of Lübeck. J.F. Sachse: Philadelphia, 1903. 

Soderlund, Jean R. Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 

Whitman, Randal L. “The Settlement of Germantown 1683-1714 and the beginning of Germantown Meeting,” Germantown Monthly Meeting website, http://gmm.gfsnet.org, at http://gmm.gfsnet.org/wordpress/?page_id=4183. 

Wolf, Stephanie Grauman. Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683-1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. 

The post Episode No. 1 – The Germantown Protest of 1688 first appeared on Found in Philadelphia.