James Forten was born on September 2, 1766, to a free African-American family in Philadelphia and learned his father's sailmaking trade. While still in his teens, he served on a privateer during the Revolutionary War (1775-83), and after his ship was captured, he refused British offers of education in exchange for his service. Following the war, Forten worked at, and then acquired, the sailmaking business of Robert Bridges. He then began to gather a fortune that made him one of the wealthiest people in Philadelphia, not to mention a leading member of the nation's so-called black elite. Regardless of how far he progressed economically, however, Forten faced the obstacle of race. In 1799, for example, an anti-slave-trading petition he and other black Philadelphians signed was rejected by Congress, 84-1. "We the People does not mean them," one southern congressman told Forten and the other petitioners. Forten wrote the lone supporter of the petition, a Massachusetts representative, and thanked him for joining the cause of justice. Throughout his life, Forten participated in other petition campaigns and struggles for racial equality, including opposition to segregated schooling in Pennsylvania and to the Quaker State's disfranchisement of black voters in 1838.

Forten was a model black activist for later figures such as Frederick Douglass. In 1849 Douglass told a New York City audience that "My heart swells with pride" at the mention of Forten's name. Like Douglass, Forten used the nation's political beliefs in constitutional equality to condemn racialist ideologies in the United States. One of his most important pieces of writing was an 1813 pamphlet critiquing a Pennsylvania bill that sought to restrict African-American migration to Pennsylvania (and even threatened to reenslave those African Americans who migrated to the state and did not register their name with a local official). Forten's essay, entitled "Series of Letters by a Man of Colour," cited the Declaration of Independence, Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual abolition act, and the state's 1790 constitution (which did not distinguish between socalled black and white rights) as evidence that the nation rested firmly on beliefs of equality for all. "Let not the spirit of the father behold the son robbed of that liberty which he died to establish," Forten wrote, "but let the motto of our legislators be 'The law knows no distinction.'" The law was not passed, but Forten's pamphlet gained prominence among black activists in other parts of the United States. In 1827 Freedom's Journal, the first independent African-American newspaper, based in New York City, republished the essay so that younger generations of activists might learn the skill of written protest.

Although initially interested in voluntary emigration schemes to Africa, Forten came to oppose the American Colonization Society, which he believed to be an enemy of free African Americans. After the society's formation in 1817, he organized anticolonization protests in Philadelphia and became an advocate of immediate abolition in the 1830s. When he died on March 4, 1842, Forten was eulogized as a founding father of African-American protest in America. His motto remained "America, with thy faults I love thee still."

Bibliography:

1) Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1745-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)

2) Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsanky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African American Protest Writing (New York: Routledge, 2001)

3) Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: A Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

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