Quakers and Slavery in the Seventeenth Century

CHS 104 Chase Auditorium
370 Lancaster Ave
Haverford, PA 19041

Contact: Susan Penn spenn@haverford.edu

Haverford College’s distinguished visitor Katharine Gerbner, McKnight Land-Grant Professor, University of Minnesota will be giving a talk about her research on Quakers and slavery.

Eighteenth-century Quakers were leaders of the abolitionist movement, but many seventeenth-century Quakers were slave owners.

In Pennsylvania, William Penn was a slave-holder, and leading English Quakers used their connections to Friends in Barbados to import enslaved men and women.

Professor Gerbner’s talk will examine how these seventeenth-century Quakers reconciled slavery with their peace testimony. I will end by asking what it means to truly reckon with the history of Quaker slave-holding today.

The talk is sponsored by the Quaker Studies Working Group, and the Department of Religion in conjunction with the Distinguished Visitors Program.