Event Details - Quakers and Slavery in the Seventeenth Century

Distinguished Visitor Katharine Gerbner, McKnight Land-Grant Professor, University of Minnesota

Abstract: 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. My 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. 

Tea at 4:15 p.m.

Sponsored by the Quaker Studies Working Group, and the Department of Religion in conjunction with the Distinguished Visitors Program