Byberry Hall

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2007

Built in 1956 amid the woods of Pennypack Park, Greenbelt Knoll was the first racially integrated housing development in Philadelphia — and a model for the nation at a time when housing discrimination was the norm. Developer Morris Milgram, a committed civil rights advocate, gathered noted architects, among them Louis Kahn, to design Modernist homes that blended into the natural landscape. Its first residents were themselves a statement, including Milgram, U.S. Rep. Robert N.C. Nix, and the Rev. Leon Sullivan.

Abington Township, PA · est. 2018

Long before abolition became a mass movement, Benjamin Lay—a Quaker, a dwarf, and a man of ferocious conviction—was denouncing slavery in colonial Pennsylvania. He staged dramatic public protests, boycotted everything made by enslaved labor, and wrote a blistering pamphlet against Quaker slaveholders that got him disowned by his own meeting. He lived simply, reportedly in a cave, and his moral witness helped push Quakers to become the first religious body in America to renounce slavery within their ranks by 1776.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 1974

Near here stood "Roadside," the home of Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), a Quaker minister whose moral force helped drive some of the century's great reform movements. A tireless abolitionist, she helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls convention and championed women's rights, temperance, and peace. Her faith and eloquence made her a leader when few women spoke publicly at all.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1983

In 1688, in the Germantown home of Tunes Kunders, a small group of German Quakers put pen to paper in what is remembered as the first formal protest against slavery in the American colonies. Drafted by Francis Daniel Pastorius and three others, the document argued on grounds of the Golden Rule that holding human beings in bondage was wrong. It came fully 92 years before Pennsylvania enacted the nation's first state abolition law.