These immigrants wrote the first U.S. protest against slavery in 1688. Philadelphia wasn’t quite ready.

Every Feb. 18, Kathy Nicholson Paulmier’s father marched her down Germantown Avenue to a run-down storefront and read two pages of old-fashioned words that told a radical story:

“These are the reasons why we are against the traffick of men-body, as followeth …”

The words, signed at that very spot in 1688, formed the first protest against slavery written in the American colonies.

“There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are.”

As Christopher Nicholson read the declaration aloud in what his daughter recalls as “this deep, beautiful social worker voice” before a small group of activists and community members, he often wondered:

Whatever happened to the original document?

A descendant of English Quakers who freed the people they had enslaved to abide by the Society of Friends’ 1776 decision to abolish the practice, Nicholson lived his convictions. He attended sit-ins at lunch counters with Bayard Rustin, the gay, Black civil rights leader. He moved the family in the 1960s to East Germantown, where all but one of his daughter’s friends were Black. “That was my childhood growing up,” she recalled. “I didn’t know it to be unusual.”

Nicholson suspected the document’s most likely hiding place was the fireproof vault on the first floor of the Arch Street Meeting House, which held about 100,000 documents from Quaker history.

But archivist Willman Spawn found no trace of the protest.

Maybe it had been stored in the wrong box, or mislabeled. Maybe Haverford College or Swarthmore had it, both founded by Quakers.

They didn’t.

For Vanessa Julye, this is not surprising.

“Its being lost and not cared for parallels to me a lot of history of people of African descent,” said the Black Quaker, who coauthored the book Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice.

“Things get lost that we don’t share and talk about in this country.”

» READ MORE: These German immigrants landed here in 1683. Philly would never be the same.

The run-down storefront that Paulmier remembers on Germantown Avenue was just the latest use of what was linen weaver Thönes Kunders’ log cabin in 1688. The men who gathered there back then were decades ahead of their time, at least.

Three of them were, like their host, former Mennonites from Krefeld in present-day Germany who came to Philadelphia to join William Penn’s experiment in religious freedom as Quakers. The Krefelders — Abraham op den Graeff and his brother Derick, and Gerhard Hendricks — spoke a low-country German. Francis Daniel Pastorius, a highly educated Lutheran from Bavaria, translated their words into English.

They took their protest to three different meetings. It was discussed at two, and rejected at the third.

Slavery was central to the economics of the growing city. The University of Minnesota historian Katharine Gerbner says that most Philadelphia Quakers owned enslaved people when the newcomers penned their protest.

Such Quakers “were not ready to question how they made their money,” said Julye.

And so the historic document was set aside, and for decades forgotten.

The Germantown protest recognized the equality of all people. Said Gerbner: “Other Quakers at the time were making arguments against slavery, but were also very racist, [feeling] that Blacks did not belong in their families or their communities.”

By 1696, the yearly meeting advised that members of the Religious Society of Friends “be careful not to encourage the bringing in of any more negroes.”

In 1730, the meeting declared new purchases of the enslaved to be “disagreeable,” and by 1758 decreed: “If any professing with us should be concerned in importing, selling or purchasing slaves, the respective monthly meetings to which they belong should manifest their disunity with such persons.”

The Quakers would ban slavery in 1776, nearly a century before the Emancipation Proclamation.

It wasn’t until 1844 that a Philadelphia antiquarian found the 1688 declaration, and published it for the first time in a Friends journal.

The document would be celebrated as a keystone of the abolitionist movement. Swarthmore historian William Hull once called it “the memorable flower of which blossomed in Philadelphia from the seed of Quakerism.”

But by the late 1960s, when Kathleen and Christopher Nicholson made their annual walk to the Kunders’ home site on Germantown Avenue, the document was again lost.

To Peter Finger, 10th-great-grandson of Abraham op den Graeff, the document is a source of pride — and strength.

“I am a gay man and I live in the middle of Trump country,” said Finger, 61, a retiree in Sioux Falls, S.D. “When I read something like the protest against slavery, it gives me hope.”

His brother, Steve Finger, a retired psychologist outside Cleveland, wasn’t aware of his ancestor when he found himself drawn to Quakerism, but feels the same call to fight racism.

“My wife and I both are looking at ‘How do we make some kind of restitution?’ ” Steve Finger said. “… We’re pretty convinced there has to be some way to make up for redlining, and fact that African Americans haven’t been able to acquire generation wealth — they’ve been intentionally prevented from that.”

One of the arguments in the declaration was that others from the Rhineland would not want to come to a place where Quakers were enslavers. But what distinguished their protest, says historian Gerbner, who passed the Kunders site each day on her way to Germantown Friends School, was its humanitarian argument. In the eyes of op den Graeff, Blacks were equal to whites.

Uncompromising in his beliefs, op den Graeff quarreled with neighbors, and left Germantown and the Quaker faith, returning to the Mennonites sometime after 1708, says Leonard Gross, a historian at Goshen College, a Mennonite college in Indiana.

Vanessa Julye, 63, now dedicates her time to making Quakerism as racially enlightened as those early protesters saw it. She worships with several groups, among them the Fellowship of Friends of African Descent and Ujima Friends Peace Center in North Philadelphia. At the Friends General Conference, an umbrella group of 17 Quaker organizations based in Center City, she coordinates a ministry on racism.

“Quakers are folks who are supposed to not be racist,” she said. “White supremacy is not supposed to be part of the culture. They were the first people to end enslavement.”

She grew up in Mantua, the daughter of a beer distributor, and as a teen boarded at Westtown School, the Quaker institution where she was exposed to meetings for worship and full access to activities. “Worship didn’t speak to me, but the principles that I experienced to some extent and that they espoused were about equality,” she said. “Being able to be a participant in student council, the disciplinary board, and making decisions around what I felt were core parts of the community at Westtown — this was very important.”

Phil Lord, a cofounder of the Ujima peace center, said the words and actions of those émigrés in Germantown 335 years ago still resound.

“The most attractive thing for me and other people of African descent is the notion that Quakers have not only historically been progressive, but are open to a leading of the spirit to help understand spiritual matters in the context of current situations,” said Lord, whose law partner introduced him to Quakerism. “It leads to a capacity to evolve and respond in spiritual ways and not get stuck in traditions that are thousands of years old.”

Six years ago, Lord cofounded the Peace Center in response to police killings of Black men around the country. The purpose of the center, he said, is to put Quakerism in the context of the African diaspora, not the European diaspora.

“Some Quakers of African American descent are very frustrated that Quakerism isn’t farther along as to its sensitivity to diversity. Quakers weren’t all abolitionists. There really were starts and stops.”

Christopher Nicholson’s quest for the original document continued in the late 1980s. Others joined the search.

By then, the Kunders homestead, once a barbershop, a shoemaker’s, an antiques store, a glass and tin factory, and a pharmaceutical company, was derelict. During the 300th anniversary celebration there of the document’s signing, State Rep. David Richardson called Germantown a model of racial integration for the rest of the city, but warned of the toll that drugs were taking: “We have to make it safe for the kids to grow up on the streets.” In 1993, a shopping center named Freedom Square rose there.

As for the “eloquent protest” itself, the expanded search party continued its work into the 1990s and beyond. Then, in 2005, came a surprise.

Back at the Arch Street Meeting House, Willman Spawn was going through some files in the fireproof vault — the first places Nicholson had asked him to look — when he came upon a folio he hadn’t seen in decades.

Inside was an old document, folded in quarters. Its words, written in ink on two sides of handmade paper, were faded, but their meaning was unmistakable.

“Someone put tape on it at some point,” recalled Heike Rass, a member of a committee Nicholson formed to hunt for the document. “There was a water stain. No other documentation.”

Its obvious age made what they’d found unmistakable.

“It was a similar surprise to those who were here — realizing it was not a facsimile, that it was the original, and that we should not have this,” said Jennifer Gray, museum director for the Arch Street Meeting House.

At the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Center City, enzyme gel softened the adhesives used to repair tears. The document was bathed in a mix of water and ethanol to reduce discolorations, and gaps were filled in with a mix of mulberry paper, wheat starch paste, and cellulose powder. Restoration took two months.

Today, the document is secured in a climate-controlled room in the Haverford College library’s Quaker collection. A couple of times a month, when students, scholars, or descendants of the signers come to see it, archivist Mary Crauderueff pulls the protest from its Mylar sleeve.

She tells visitors that the Germantown protest is her favorite document.

She reflects on the fact that after the protest’s creation, a full century passed before Quakers officially declared their support for abolition: “There was still a lot of damage and trauma in those 100 years.”

What she appreciates most about the petition, she said, ”is that it is just two sides of one piece of paper, but it has a really complex history. I think of it as a mystical document in the way it has appeared and disappeared over time.”