[Footnote 1:  Ibid., p. 251.]

[Footnote 2:  Quaker Pamphlet, p. 42.]

[Footnote 3:  Wickersham, History of Ed. in Pa., p. 252.]

[Footnote 4:  Ibid., p. 251.]

[Footnote 5:  Turner, The Negro in Pa., p. 128.]

The next decade was of larger undertakings.[1] The report of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society of 1801 shows that there had been an increasing interest in Negro education.  For this purpose the society had raised funds to the amount of $530.50 per annum for three years.[2] In 1803 certain other friends of the cause left for this purpose two liberal benefactions, one amounting to one thousand dollars, and the other to one thousand pounds.[3] With these contributions the Quakers and Abolitionists erected in 1809 a handsome building valued at four thousand dollars.  They named it Clarkson Hall in honor of the great friend of the Negro race.[4] In 1807 the Quakers met the needs of the increasing population of the city by founding an additional institution of learning known as the Adelphi School.[5]

[Footnote 1:  Parish, Remarks on the Slavery, etc., p. 43.]

[Footnote 2:  Proceedings of the American Conv., 1802, p. 18.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., 1803, p. 13.]

[Footnote 4:  Statistical Inquiry into the Condition of the Colored People of Philadelphia, p. 19.]

[Footnote 5:  Ibid., p. 20.]

After the first decade of the nineteenth century the movement for the uplift of the Negroes around Philadelphia was checked a little by the migration to that city of many freedmen who had been lately liberated.  The majority of them did not “exhibit that industry, economy, and temperance” which were “expected by many and wished by all."[1] Not deterred, however, by this seemingly discouraging development, the friends of the race toiled on as before.  In 1810 certain Quaker women who had attempted to establish a school for colored girls in 1795 apparently succeeded.[2] The institution, however, did not last many years.  But the Clarkson Hall schools maintained by the Abolition Society were then making such progress that the management was satisfied that they furnished a decided refutation of the charge that the “mental endowments of the descendants of the African race are inferior to those possessed by their white brethren."[3] They asserted without fear of contradiction that the pupils of that seminary would sustain a fair comparison with those of any other institution in which the same elementary branches were taught.  In 1815 these schools were offering free instruction to three hundred boys and girls, and to a number of adults attending evening schools.  These victories had been achieved despite the fact that in regard to some of the objects of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade “a tide of prejudice, popular and legislative, set strongly against them."[4] After 1818, however, help was obtained from the State to educate the colored children of Columbia and Philadelphia.