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| Detail of "Rev. Peter Williams [Jr.].” From Woodson, The History of the Negro Church, 94–95 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons) |
Peter Williams, Jr. was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey (in the Diocese of New Jersey) in 1786. His family moved to New York soon after, where his father was involved in the founding of the AME Zion Church. Williams attended the African Free School as a child and received tutoring from the Episcopal priests Thomas Lyell and John Henry Hobart. In New York he attended Trinity Church[1] as a young man until he helped to found St. Philip’s African Church, which was the second founded Black Episcopal church in the United States.[2] He published extensively on abolition,[3] jointly founding the first African American newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal,[4] and regularly argued against the racist positions of the American Colonization Society (ACS). In 1808 he delivered an abolitionist address in the City which was to become one of the first published Black abolitionist writings. In this speech he said:
Review, for a moment, my brethren, the history of the Slave Trade, engendered in the foul recesses of the sordid mind, the unnatural monster inflicted gross evils on the human race. Its baneful footsteps are marked with blood; its infections breath spreads war and desolation; and its train is composed of the complicated miseries, of cruel and unceasing bondage...[5]
Oh, God! We thank thee, that thou didst condescend to listen to the cries of Africa’s wretched sons; and that thou didst interfere in their behalf. At thy call humanity sprang forth, and espoused the cause of the oppressed: one hand she employed in drawing from their vitals the deadly arrows of injustice; and the other in holding a shield, to defend them from fresh assaults: and at that illustrious moment, when the sons of ’76 pronounced these United States free and independent; when the spirit of patriotism, erected a temple sacred to liberty; when the inspired voice of Americans first uttered those noble sentiments, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and when the bleeding African, lifting his fetters, exclaimed, “am I not a man and a brother;” then with redoubled efforts, the angel of humanity strove to restore to the African race, the inherent rights of man.[6]
He was ordained to the priesthood in 1826, the second Black man ordained in the Episcopal church, and became the first rector of St. Philip’s. White leaders of his diocese often sought to control or prevent his abolitionist work,[7] but he remained a persistent voice for equality and freedom. When, following a riot instigated by the ACS in 1834 against abolitionists, in which Williams’ own home was burned and his church temporarily closed, and Bishop Onderdonk exhorted Williams to dissociate himself from the American Anti-Slavery Society,[8] Williams wrote the following firm response:
In regard to my opposition to the Colonization Society… that Society has held out the idea, that a colored man, however he may strive to make himself intelligent, virtuous and useful, can never enjoy the privileges of a citizen of the United States, but must ever remain a degraded and oppressed being. I could not, and do not believe that the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gospel of Christ, have not power sufficient to raise him…[9]
For more online about the great Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. see:
Peter Williams, Jr., “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/16/
https://blackpresence.episcopalny.org/person/the-reverend-peter-williams-jr-3/
"Peter Williams, Jr." at Black Past
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-peter-jr-1780-1840/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Williams_Jr.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] Now known as Trinity Church, Wall Street.
[2] First organized in 1809, and formally admitted to the Episcopal Church in 1819. See George F. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (Baltimore: Church Advocate Press, 1922), 81-89. The Church has moved location northward to Harlem since its founding.
[3] See, for example, his speech “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” delivered in 1808: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/16/.
[4] See Jacqueline Bacon, Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Lexington Books, 2007). See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom%27s_Journal.
[5] Williams, “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 12.
[6] Williams, “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 19.
[7] See D.C. Heath, “The coercion of a black priest: Peter Williams, 1834,” in David B. Davis, ed., Antebellum American Culture (Lexington, MA: 1979), 295-98.
[8] Williams was on the board of the organization.
[9] Heath, “The coercion of a black priest,” 297.
