In 1784, four hundred Black Philadelphians walked behind the coffin of a small French schoolmaster named Anthony Benezet --- a man who spent fifty years quietly insisting, in classrooms and pamphlets and letters to kings, that every soul deserved to be educated, to be free, to be seen. Born a Huguenot refugee and drawn to the Quaker conviction that the Inner Light burns equally in every person, Benezet founded the first public school for girls in North America, opened his home in the evenings to teach enslaved and free Black Philadelphians, and became the connective tissue of the transatlantic abolition movement --- his writings reaching Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, John Wesley, and Benjamin Franklin. But this episode is about something deeper than biography. It is about the difference between forgiveness and justice --- why forgiveness is the private, sacred work of a single soul, and why justice is different, why it will not yield to even the most spiritually advanced individual acting alone, why it must be built collectively, and why that means your own spiritual advancement is inextricably tied to the advancement of your neighbor. Benezet didn't save anyone. He built with them. And in doing so, all of them moved the pillar forward together.

Read the transcript

Share and read comments.