Join the authors of Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880, for a discussion and reception Friday, March 24, at 5:00 pm in the Philips Wing and Special Collections. Drawing heavily on the Benjamin Coates African Colonization Collection from Haverford Special Collections, Back to Africa has been called “essential reading for every student of black studies, abolitionism, Quaker history, and nineteenth-century reform in general.”

Professor of History and Curator of the Quaker Collection Emma Lapsansky-Werner will speak at the Haverford Township Free Library on Thursday, January 26, at 7:00 p.m. in the Community Room.  Her topic will be Benjamin Franklin and his relationships with Quakers and Abolitionists.  The program is made possible by a grant from the PHC One Book, One Philadelphia.

Emily Higgs, a student assistant in Special Collections, has completed an annotated index to the Robert Pleasants letterbook, a part of the records of Baltimore Yearly Meeting (item #168). Pleasants (1722-1801), a member of Curles Monthly Meeting, Virginia Yearly Meeting, is known for his work as an abolitionist. He freed his eighty slaves and urged the ratification of a law proposing gradual emancipation for the children of slaves. Pleasants established the Gravelly Hill School for the free children of slaves. The letterbook covers the period 1754-1797 and centers on matters of religion and abolition. We anticipate making the letterbook web-accessible in the near future.

Back to Africa : Benjamin Coates and the colonization movement in America, 1848-1880, edited by Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Professor of History and Curator of the Quaker Collection, and Margaret Hope Bacon, noted Quaker author and former Haverford Gest Fellow, has recently been published by Penn State University Press. Back to Africa, which draws on the papers of Benjamin Coates from Haverford Special Collections, has been called “essential reading for every student of black studies, abolitionism, Quaker history, and nineteenth-century reform in general.”