Haverford, Howard, and Beyond: the search for 413 forgotten Philadelphians

In April 2021, Avis Wanda McClinton received a box from archivists at Haverford College. A retired steelworker and Black community activist from North Hills, Pa., she has spent the last decade commemorating and recognizing unmarked African American burial sites in Quaker graveyards. She slit the box open and lifted out reproductions of 200-plus-year-old documents.

The sheaf of papers concerned Quaker freedom guarantees, also known as “manumissions,” for 413 enslaved African Americans contractually freed in the Philadelphia area between 1765 and 1790. As she read their names — Polly, Accro, Philas, Dianah, Juliet, and her children — McClinton could feel the promise and potential of their lives. “They were real people, just like me and you,” she said.

McClinton joined the Quaker faith in the early 2000s when she thought all Quakers had been abolitionists. In 1780, Pennsylvania, led by Quaker abolitionists, became the first state to mandate the gradual manumission of all enslaved people. But these 339 manumissions — a lesser number than 413 because sometimes one document freed more than one enslaved person — are irrefutable evidence Quakers had condoned slavery.

As the community liaison and Quaker preservationist for Haverford College’s project ”Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers,” McClinton posed a question no one had ever addressed: What happened to the manumitted?

Last November, McClinton inched closer to an answer when Washington’s Howard University and 339 Manumissions & Beyond, an advisory group led by McClinton, signed a memorandum of agreement to uncover the fates of those 413 Philadelphians previously enslaved and then lost to public memory.

Despite being among the first advocates for the abolishment of slavery — Germantown Quakers denounced the practice of enslavement in 1688 — Quakers enslaved people. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) — the organizing body of Quaker Meetings in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland — deemed slaveholding a disownable offense in 1774. In 1776, it required slaveholding members to produce proof of manumission or risk expulsion from worship services.

“The process of convincing many slaveholding members to manumit slaves … was a lengthy one,” notes Haverford’s postbaccalaureate fellow David Satten-López. It included 111 disciplinary proceedings against Quakers who engaged in the slave trade between 1757-76.

Even after the Quakers manumitted, the Society of Friends was still “not really welcoming these free Blacks into their meetings as equals,” says former history teacher, Quaker, and 339 Manumissions & Beyond project member Dennis Gregg. They were asked to sit in separate sections.

McClinton has concerns about how the newly manumitted would have fared once their emancipation took effect.

For one thing, the manumissions were not always immediate. They were unenforceable documents, she stresses.

Another issue facing the newly manumitted was community and societal support. Howard University’s research team will investigate what kind of systematic assistance (such as money and land) the Quakers provided the recently manumitted, and whether Quaker leadership punished members who failed to comply.

Knowing that these documents were penned in the late 1700s, McClinton pointed out that a nationwide emancipation was still about 75 years away. “They weren’t safe! Anyone could just click them over the head, and they’d be sold back into slavery!”

As the only Black person on Haverford’s Manumitted project, McClinton assembled the multiracial advisory board called 339 Manumissions & Beyond Project (composed of nine members, including Satten-López) in late 2022. Its goal is to discover the full identities and fates of those named in the documents. Two members are verifiably descended from enslavers. But as far as the group knows, Kitty Taylor Mizuno is the only one directly descended from enslavers in the manumission documents.

One of the documents was signed by her great-great-great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side — Jonathan David Evans, a rum and molasses importer who lived from 1714 to 1795. Based on the manumission he signed on Jan. 7, 1779, 16 years before his death, he’d enslaved two people — a woman named Celia and a man named Cesar.

Twenty years ago, Mizuno met McClinton while working on a Quaker committee for racial justice and equality. In 2022, McClinton invited Mizuno to join the 339 Manumissions & Beyond Project. Since learning of her ancestor’s participation in slavery, Mizuno has felt “kicked by God to take action.” In a recent letter to the Haverford alumni magazine, Mizuno wrote, “I think about how the privileged lifestyle and assumptions of my slaveholding family continue to be part of our family culture today.” To date, no book contains any information about Celia and Cesar’s life after manumission, or notes if they had children.

Stephanie Leonard, a former member of the Ambler chapter of the NAACP (she’s since relocated to California) and project member, sees another opportunity. In addition to identifying those who left bondage for freedom and accomplishment, this work will lay the foundation for what she calls a much-needed “Black Ellis Island.” Leonard is the mother of biracial children who trace their father’s heritage to an Irish village. But when it comes to her side of the family, she tells her sons, “We can’t do that. I can’t do that. I don’t know if my mother could do that.”

Led by Michael Ralph, the Cameron Schrier Professor and chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, and Nathalie Frédéric Pierre, an assistant professor in history, and assisted by Howard’s team of undergraduate and graduate students, the researchers will compile comprehensive “booklike” dossiers for the 54 manumitted persons who are listed in the documents with both first and last names. The students will (ideally) create genealogical records for all 413, including their descendants, and be organized in a format compatible with publicly accessible genealogical databases.

“This isn’t just a five-year thing — it’s a 25-year thing — that’s where the ‘Beyond’ comes from,” McClinton told an audience of Quakers and students from the University of Tennessee this past fall.

Swarthmore College also has manumissions, McClinton says. Presumably, so does the New England Yearly Meeting. And Baltimore Yearly Meeting. And New York Yearly Meeting. And the Carolina Yearly Meetings. It’s possible, she says, that other Quakers will try to find formerly enslaved humans who might otherwise remain unknown. ”This is part of really looking at the more complicated, real history of our country,” said Satten-López.