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Williams, Peter, Jr.
3 articles on Williams, Peter, Jr.
Williams, Peter, Jr.
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1336 Includes: Bibliography(b. c. 1780; d. 17 October 1840),
Episcopal clergyman and abolitionist. Williams was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of Peter Williams Sr., a slave, and Mary Durham, a black indentured servant from Saint Kitts in the Caribbean. Williams Sr. was a revered sexton and undertaker for the John Street Methodist Church in New York City before the Revolutionary War, in which he had served as a Patriot soldier. Following the conflict, the church purchased him from his departing Loyalist master in 1783 and then allowed him to work for his freedom, which he purchased in 1796. Williams Sr. became a founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York City and a leader of the city's black middle class. Troubled by Methodist recalcitrance toward the emergence of a black clergy, the Williams family and other ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1811780–1840
American minister, abolitionist, and church founder. Peter Williams Jr. was raised in the Methodist church under the tutelage of the white minister Thomas Lyell. In 1818, with the blessing of the white congregation of Lyell's John Street Methodist Episcopal Church, he organized a separate black congregation. St. Philip's African Church was consecrated in Harlem on July 3, 1819, and in 1826, Williams was ordained, making him the first black Episcopalian priest. An ardent abolitionist, he helped found Freedom's Journal in 1827, a black-owned newspaper that demanded an end to slavery and the inception of racial equality. For two years he served as a manager of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Rumors that he had performed an interracial marriage ended his public career, but he continued to be active ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1096 Includes: Further Reading(1780?–17 Oct. 1840), clergyman and abolitionist, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of Peter Williams Sr., a slave, and Mary Durham, a black indentured servant from St. Kitts. A patriot soldier during the American Revolution, his father was sexton and undertaker for John Street Methodist Church in New York City. In an unusual arrangement, the church in 1783 purchased him from his departing Loyalist master and allowed him to purchase himself over time, completing his freedom in 1796. A founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and a tobacconist and funeral home owner, he was a leader of the small black middle class in New York City.Williams Jr. was educated first at the African Free School and tutored privately by a white minister, Reverend Thomas Lyell, of John1798 ...
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