Crystal Bird Fauset

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1985

Abraham L. Pennock lived at Hoodland, a house built by his father-in-law in 1823, until his death in 1868. A leader in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, he lent his energy to abolition alongside the causes of woman suffrage and temperance. Reform-minded visitors, including the poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, passed through his doors.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999

Built between 1887 and 1897 as a soaring Gothic Revival church, the Church of the Advocate became a spiritual and political anchor for North Philadelphia's growing African American community after 1930. It hosted major Black Power gatherings in the 1960s and '70s, and in 1974 it made history as the site where the first eleven women were ordained Episcopal priests.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

In the decades before and after the Civil War, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was among the most widely read and widely heard Black voices in America—a poet, novelist, and traveling lecturer who took the abolitionist and, later, equal-rights cause to audiences across the country. From this Philadelphia home she wrote and organized, insisting that education was the surest road to advancement for Black Americans. Her work bridged the antislavery struggle and the reform movements of the later 19th century.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Founded in the 1950s by Dawud Hakim, this Philadelphia shop was the city's first Black-owned bookstore devoted to Black history and authors—a place where readers could find their own story on the shelves. Through the 1960s it became a gathering point for civil rights organizing and Black activism. That prominence also drew the eye of the FBI, which surveilled Hakim's along with other Black bookstores of the era.