Roy Campanella (1921-1993)

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

Known as the "Lion of Zion," the Rev. Dr. Leon Howard Sullivan pastored Philadelphia's Zion Baptist Church for 37 years and turned his pulpit into an engine for economic justice. His Selective Patronage Movement — boycotting companies that refused to hire Black workers — opened thousands of jobs nationwide, and his gospel of self-help built lasting institutions to train minority workers. Decades later, his Global Sullivan Principles pressed corporations toward human rights and helped isolate apartheid South Africa, earning him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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.

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. 2013

William Lewis was a Philadelphia lawyer and judge whose convictions helped end slavery in his state at the dawn of the republic. He played a key role in drafting and passing Pennsylvania's 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery — the first such law in America — and spent his life defending the freedom it granted, serving as counsel for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. His elegant summer home, Strawberry Mansion, built in 1789, still stands as a reminder of the man.