Sarah Mapps Douglass

Douglass' grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, a Quaker who owned a bakery and operated a school run from his home, was an early member of the Free African Society.

In 1854, the school merged with the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney State University) on Lombard Street, and Douglass become the head of the primary department, a position she held until her retirement in 1877.

As a teacher, she was committed to giving girls equal opportunities to learn subjects which had previously been reserved primarily for boys, including mathematics and sciences.

[8] Douglass's role as an activist began as early as 1831, when at twenty-five, she organized the collection of money to send to William Lloyd Garrison to support The Liberator, which she also served as a contributor to.

These societies turned to reading as an invaluable method of acquiring knowledge and to writing as a means of asserting identity, recording information, and communicating with a black public that ranged from the literate to the semi-literate to the illiterate.

"[15] According to their supporter William Lloyd Garrison, nearly all of the members would weekly write original pieces, put anonymously into a box, that a committee afterwards criticized.

[15] Douglass herself often wrote prose and poetry, much of it published in "Ladies' Department" of The Liberator, The Colored American, and the Anglo-African Magazine under the pseudonym Zillah and possibly also "Sophonisba.

I started up, and with one mighty effort threw from me the lethargy which had covered me as a mantle for years; and determined, by the help of the Almighty, to use every exertion in my power to elevate the character of my wronged and neglected race.With her mother, she was a founding member (1833) of the biracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.

The purpose of the society was to secure the total abolition of slavery as soon as possible, without any compensation to the slaveholders, as well as to procure equal civil and religious rights with the white people of the United States.

[18] On December 14, 1833, the society finalized their Constitution, which stated that they deemed it their duty "as professing Christians to manifest [their] abhorrence of the flagrant injustice and deep sin of slavery by united and vigorous exertions.

This included circulating petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and other federal territories and for suppressing the slave trade between the American states.