Rev. Jehu Jones, Jr. (1786-1852)

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was among the foremost Black sculptors in America, working in an era when both her race and her gender stood as barriers to recognition. From this Philadelphia home she pursued an art shaped by study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and, later, in Paris under the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. Her powerful figures gave form to human suffering and the African-American experience.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

From his Philadelphia home, William Still worked as a key agent of the Underground Railroad, guiding fugitives from slavery toward freedom and carefully recording their names and stories so that separated families might one day reunite. A prosperous coal merchant, he used his standing and resources to advance Black civil rights, helping found the city's first Black YMCA. His meticulous accounts, later published, remain one of the most important firsthand records of the Underground Railroad.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

In 1854, free Black Philadelphians founded this literary and educational society in a city that was a hub of antebellum African-American intellectual life. Named for Benjamin Banneker—the self-taught astronomer, almanac author, and surveyor of the new federal capital—the institute embodied the belief that learning was a form of liberation. In an era when most Black Americans were still enslaved, its members cultivated debate, study, and self-improvement as acts of dignity and resistance.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Dedicated in 1892 and named for Saint Peter Claver, a 16th-century Jesuit who ministered to enslaved Africans and condemned the slave trade, this was Philadelphia's first Roman Catholic church established for Black worshippers. In an era of pervasive segregation, it offered African American Catholics a spiritual home of their own. From the 1920s onward it also flourished as a cultural center anchoring the surrounding Black community.