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Transcript:
[Marcus Rediker]
In the 1650s, Quakers were extremely radical. They would disrupt meetings, They would go naked for a sign, as they put it. They believed in acting out their ideas. Benjamin Lay was born in Copforde England, unusually for his time since he was born in 1682, a third generation of Quaker. And he himself was a much more ardent and more radical Quaker than either his grandparents or his parents. That tradition of radical Quakerism, even though it had to some extent died out by the 1680s, was revived by Benjamin and attached to the issue of slavery.
Benjamin’s education about slavery actually began during his time as a sailor. Some of his fellow sailors had been on slave ships. These sailors were famous for telling stories — the sailors yarn, as it’s called — and some of the stories were about the violent exploitation of African women. And he was horrified by this.
So when he felt the need in 1718 to leave London, where he had gotten in trouble with the local Quaker meeting, he and his wife Sarah decided to sail to Barbados. But he actually entered the world’s probably leading and most violent slave society at that time. Well, when Benjamin got to Bridgetown, Barbados, and set up his shop, he was shocked to see what kind of society this was. Enslaved people would come into his shop and they were literally starving to death. Gaunt. He also saw the whippings, the floggings, the tortures. He knew a man who ended up committing suicide because he wouldn’t bear any more beatings from his enslaver. And he saw that a lot of Quakers participated in this system. Benjamin and Sarah as they put it, they couldn’t breathe In the smoky darkness of Barbados society, and they felt that they might become like these other Quakers. They would lose their heart by living amidst such oppression. They left Barbados in 1720, after about a year and a half. But that was a decisive time and Benjamin was an abolitionist ever after.
When Benjamin and Sarah set sail for Philadelphia, they were very excited to go to this Quaker colony. This was Pennsylvania named for the Penn family. This was a place where Quakers were in charge of the state legislature. They made the laws. They ran society. This was going to be a place of liberty and tolerance — and when Benjamin gets there, he discovers that there’s slavery there, as there was in Barbados. More than half of the members of the Philadelphia Monthly meeting owned slaves. So Benjamin says, “What is going on here? This is supposed to be a kind of Quaker utopia, and you’ve got slavery?” He believed that people were sleepwalking, that they weren’t awake and alert to the injustice that was going on all around them. And he thought it was his job to wake them up.
[Benjamin] studied a group of very radical philosophers in ancient Greece called the cynics, and one of their main ideas is that a truly moral person must speak truth to power. You must go into lair of power and confront people who are doing the wrong thing. And Benjamin did that. Benjamin Lay’s most famous act came in 1738. Benjamin’s enemies were the older Quakers who had a real base of power in the Philadelphia yearly meeting. They were the wealthier Quakers — the weighty Quakers, as I think they’re still called — and they didn’t like this ministry against slavery at all. Many of them were slaves themselves.
Benjamin went to the Philadelphia yearly meeting held in Burlington, New Jersey, And all of the weighty Quakers were there. And Benjamin went with a plan. He had found military uniform. And, of course, Quakers in 1738 were committed pacifists. So this was already a provocation. He had a sword that he buckled at his waist. And then he took a book, And he cut out a secret compartment and filled it up with bright red poke berry juice. Then he threw an overcoat over his shoulders and went into the Burlington meeting and sat in a conspicuous place near the weighty Quakers. People rise and speak as the spirit moves them. And Benjamin waited a good while, and then he rose to speak, and he said that “slavery is the biggest sin in the world.” People expected that knew he would say that. Then he threw off the overcoat. People saw the uniform and the sword and the book, and there was this audible gasp that filled the Quaker meeting house. Then he took the book and he held it above his head, and he pulled out the sword and he said, “God will take vengeance against those people who oppress their fellow creatures. And he runs the sword through the book, and the fake blood comes gushing down his arm, and he sprinkles it on the heads of the slave owners”. And total pandemonium breaks out! He wanted people to think, to discuss, to decide. These were all very deliberately calculated acts of theater.
[George Schaefer]
Abington meeting was originally built around 1700. When Benjamin Lay and his wife came to Philadelphia they settled in this area and became members of the meeting here. Benjamin Lay’s wife Sarah was a recognized and recorded minister and the Society of Friends, and after her death Benjamin Lay moved to the cave that is not far from here.
The other thing that he did was, you know, he loved children and he befriended the children of the Quakers in the meeting — and he would bring them to his cave.
[Rob Peagler]
The parents didn’t know where the son went and were worried about him, were really upset, and then towards the end of the day, they went like, “Benjamin, have you seen our kid?”And he was like, “We’ve been having a great time here all day. And by the way, having somebody take your kid, how do you feel about that? How does that feel?”
[George Schaefer]
So that didn’t go over well with a lot of the members of the meeting, and eventually he was writ out of meeting or disowned.
[Marcus Rediker]
He was disowned by four different Quaker meetings. And it was originally the Quakers who tried to suppress his voice. When Benjamin Lay died in 1759, a lot of people responded to that by telling stories about him. And he did this and he did that. And so they’re kind of, in a way, recapitulating the debate that Benjamin sought to create through his actions. For example, you know, Benjamin Lay wasn’t just an anti-slavery activist. He was a vegan 200 years before the word was invented. He believed in animal rights. He believed in gender equality. He believed in environmental protection. All of the different kinds of equality were connected. And a lot of this later generation of Quakers, a whole complex of radical ideas, were things that they embraced.
The way history is told is governed to a large extent by power relations. Historians and the most powerful people in any given society decide what that history should be. And so very radical figures like Benjamin Lay are left out. So we are the victims of this sanitized and whitewashed history, because it robs us of the ability to imagine alternatives for how things could have been. And that then is linked, in turn, to imagining a better future.
[George Schaefer]
We passed the minute of reconciliation a few years ago, where we address not only slaveholding, but the settling of the land. We also have a historical marker in the burial ground, and it’s in a place that we approximate might be where Benjamin lay. We also have established a reparations fund. The legacy of Benjamin Lay here, it keeps us on our toes regarding our own complicity and our own complacency with regard to what’s going on in the world around us now. I mean, it’s not easy, you know, because most of us want to idealize the past and we want to… we all want to think of ourselves as good people. Uncovering these flaws, if you will, in our history and in our ancestors, it takes some refocusing. We can’t really go forward honestly unless we have some kind of reconciliation.
[Marcus Rediker]
It depends on people in the present making the determined effort to remember him and make him part of who we are.
Discussion Question:
- How do you challenge systemic wrongs in your own life?
- What can we all learn from Benjamin Lay?
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
It’s good to see the meeting room where we worshiped throughout my 12 years at Abington Friends School. Unfortunately, as students we never heard of Benjamin Lay or of Lucretia Mott, my biggest Quaker heroes now. (I’m Class of ’61) I hope later generations of Friends School students are learning about them and other Quakers who were ahead of their times and laid the foundations of social advances we take for granted now.
I loved this!
This is a ‘must-watch’ video. It brings the past into the present with force and conviction and challenges me to make changes to my own complacency.