James W. C. Pennington

James William Charles Pennington was born into slavery in 1807 on a Tilghman plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When he was about four years old, he and his mother were given to Frisby Tilghman and taken to Rockland Farm near Hagerstown, in western Maryland. There he was raised and trained as a skilled carpenter and blacksmith, mastering the forge and the workbench under the weight of bondage.

On October 28, 1827, at the age of nineteen, he escaped the plantation, leaving behind his parents and siblings. Traveling north on foot, he was sheltered in Pennsylvania by the Quakers William and Phoebe Wright, who nurtured his hunger for learning. He went on to become the first Black person known to attend classes at Yale, though he was denied enrollment and a degree, and was ordained a minister, serving Congregational and Presbyterian congregations in Hartford and New York.

Pennington became a towering abolitionist voice. In 1841 he wrote "The Origin and History of the Colored People," regarded as one of the first histories of African Americans. In 1849 he published his memoir, "The Fugitive Blacksmith," in London, and that same year the University of Heidelberg awarded him an honorary doctorate of divinity, the first such honor granted to an African American. He accepted it, in his words, "in trust for my People."

Caught abroad when the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, he remained in the British Isles until friends purchased his freedom. He labored for the enslaved and the newly freed until his death in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 22, 1870. May the fugitive who became a doctor of the church be honored forever.