The abolitionist movement was the first American reform movement in which black people played a major role. Former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass and African American freemen such as David Walker and Frances Watkins Harper were important voices in the abolitionist crusade. The first American abolitionists, however, were whites. Before the American Revolution, most African Americans were slaves, and the few freemen lacked the tools necessary to initiate or direct any reform movement. Most could neither read nor write, and they played no role in the political life of colonial America or in the new American republic.

The first black abolitionists whose voices were heard emerged during the late eighteenth century. These were solitary protesters unconnected to any national antislavery movement. By the 1830s, however, an organized national abolitionist movement had formed in the United States, and African Americans began joining it...