The family has included artists, educators, journalists and activists, both against slavery and against Jim Crow.
[2] Cyrus would go on to either purchase his freedom or receive manumission at an indeterminate date, then become a businessman and landowner in his own right thereafter.
At the time of his death in 1806, he was a leading member of the African-American upper class of Philadelphia.
Cyrus and his wife, the mixed race Elizabeth Morey (1746-1827, of Native American and European descent), had eight children.
Other notable descendants of Cyrus and Elizabeth Morey Bustill include the performer and activist Paul Robeson, the artist David Bustill Bowser, the educator, abolitionist and writer Sarah Mapps Douglass, the journalist and activist Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and the artist and activist Robert Douglass Jr.