[citation needed] Born February 22, 1804, in Drumore Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to an enslaved African-American house servant and her white owner.

His support of the temperance movement was motivated by liquor's destructive effect on Africa and the belief that alcohol consumption was a contributing factor for Africans selling their own people into slavery.

[4] He was also involved in the Philomathean Institute of Philadelphia, a literary organization which included Frederick Douglass, Charles Burleigh Purvis, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, and Izaiah Weir.

[5] His sister Mary Ann married James Hollensworth and settled in Dresden, Ontario, Canada, a final destination on the Underground Railroad.

[10][11] Whipper, along with Alfred Niger and Augustus Price, was elected to draft and deliver an address to the American Moral Reform Society that explained the purpose of the organization to the general public.

The speech also called for "the elimination of 'national distinctions, complexional variations, geographical lines, and sectional bounds' in the reform society's conduct.

[12] In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Whipper worked with George DeBaptiste to purchase a steamboat, the T. Whitney, which shipped lumber and escaping slaves between Sandusky, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Amherstburg, Ontario.

Dr. Purnell, a graduate of Howard University School of Medicine, served in the United States Army during the Spanish–American War and the Philippine Insurrection.

[16] William Whipper Purnell married Theodora Lee of Chicago, Illinois, granddaughter of John Jones, a tailor, businessman and, before the Civil War, a well known abolitionist.

They had one son, Lee Julian Purnell (1896–1983), who was one of the first African Americans to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he took a degree in electrical engineering.

His son Lee Julian Purnell, Jr. was an electrician and building contractor who, in 1983, survived a 100-foot fall down an elevator shaft at the Forest Glen Station of the D.C.