February events in local African American history
February 3, 1837: The Pennsylvania Antislavery Society is formed in convention at Shakespeare Hall in Harrisburg. Attendees include Dr. F. Julius LeMoyne, Charles C. Burleigh, Jonathan Blanchard, and Benjamin Lundy. John Greenleaf Whittier reports on the proceedings for The Liberator.
February 8, 1865: Delegates to The State Equal Rights Convention of Colored People of Pennsylvania meet in Harrisburg to again petition for the restoration of the vote to African American men. That right had been taken away by the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1838, despite the efforts of Thaddeus Stevens, who vigorously fought against the constitutional change.
February 12, 1793: Passage of the first Federal Fugitive Slave Act, intended to replace the legal maze of local, state and pre-existing federal laws regarding fugitive slaves.
February 14, 1818: Abolitionist Frederick Douglass is born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Because his actual day of birth was unknown to him, Douglass adopted February 14th as his birthday.
February 18, 1688: The “Germantown Protest” is written. Garret Hendericks, Derick up de Graeff, Abraham up den Graef and Francis Daniell Pastorius, four Quakers at Germantown, Pennsylvania, write a protest against the enslavement of Africans. Based upon the Golden Rule, it was delivered to the larger Monthly Meeting, where it was not acted upon and was largely ignored.
February 20, 1843: Paxton Lodge No. 5, an African American Masonic Lodge, is established in Harrisburg.
February 22, 1839: Octavius Valentine Catto is born in Charleston, South Carolina. Catto became a teacher at Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth and was invaluable in raising large numbers of African American troops during the Civil War. A tireless equal rights activist, Catto was murdered on Election Day, October 10, 1871 by opposition party rowdies.
February 22, 1841: Painter Grafton Tyler Brown is born in Harrisburg.
February 24, 1811: Daniel Alexander Payne is born in Charleston, South Carolina to free African American parents Martha and London Payne. Payne attended the Lutheran Seminary at Gettysburg in 1835 and went on to become the sixth bishop of the A.M.E. church. He founded Wilberforce University, becoming the first African American president of a college.
February 24, 1837: An anti-abolition meeting in Susquehanna Township elects trustees to manage the Hailman Schoolhouse in the township. The citizens charge the trustees with allowing the use of the schoolhouse for preaching, "but in no event shall they open the door to lectures on abolitionism, negroism, and amalgamationism."
February 25, 1782: Thirty-year-old Hercules Johnston, “a mulatto,” enlists in the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment, in Carlisle. Johnston is described as “5 Feet 8 inches high, born in Paxtang, Lancaster county, short black curled hair, a blemish on his left eye, yellow complexion, by trade a hammerman.
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