The Atkinson Family

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Opened in 1968, Sullivan Progress Plaza was the first shopping center in the nation built, owned, and operated by African Americans. It grew from the efforts of Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, members of Zion Baptist Church, and the surrounding Black community, who pooled small investments to create it. Its visible success drew national notice—prompting President Nixon to fund a corporation to spread similar commercial development—and inspired Black-led economic ventures across the country.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Born enslaved in 1795, Stephen Smith purchased his own freedom and went on to become one of the wealthiest African Americans of his era, amassing a fortune in coal, lumber, and real estate. He poured his means and influence into the abolitionist cause and philanthropy, most notably as the principal benefactor of the Stephen Smith Home for the Aged, which stood on this site. His life bridged the worlds of business, activism, and charity in the decades surrounding the Civil War.

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.

Whitemarsh Township, PA · est. 2000

By the 1850s the Corson family's Whitemarsh homestead — a station on the Underground Railroad since long before — had become a center of antislavery activism. In 1856 George and Martha Maulsby Corson opened a meeting hall above their carriage shed where leading abolitionist orators addressed crowds of up to 200. Decades later the hall found a second life as the studio of Thomas Hovenden, whose painting "Last Moments of John Brown" became one of the era's iconic images of the abolitionist cause.