Leaders in abolition

William Lloyd Garrison was a radical abolitionist in Massachusetts. Highly active in religious reform movements, Garrison started his own paper, The Liberator, in 1831 to deliver an uncompromising message: immediate emancipation of slaves with no payment to slaveholders.

David Walker, a free black man, advised other African Americans to fight for freedom rather than wit for slave owners to end slavery. He wrote, "The man who would not fight . . .ought to be kept with all of his children or family, in slavery, or in chains, to be butchered by his cruel enemies."

Born into slavery in 1817, Frederick Douglass had been taught to read and write by the wife of one of his owners. Her husband ordered her to stop, and this made Douglass realize that knowledge could be his way out of slavery. By 1838, Douglass held a skilled job in Baltimore. Douglass escaped to New York where he read The Liberator, and even met Garrison. Garrison, so awed by Douglass's speaking that he sponsored him to lecture.