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William Lloyd Garrison

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William Lloyd Garrison
Birthday
BirthplaceNewburyport, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died
NationalityAmerican
Occupation
Abolitionist

Garrison, William Lloyd

(1805–79) journalist, abolitionist, social activist; born in Newburyport, Mass. With little formal education, he was a printer by trade who became editor of several small New England papers (1824–28). Turning his attention away from temperance to slavery, in Boston (1829) he delivered the first of his innumerable and inflammatory public addresses against slavery; later that year he joined Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore to help edit the Genius of Universal Emancipation. If not the first abolitionist, Garrison was one of the earliest to demand the "immediate and complete emancipation" of slaves. Founder/editor of The Liberator (1831–65), he continued his uncompromising attacks on slavery despite threats and harassment from pro-slavery opponents and often disagreement and dismay from other less absolute abolitionists. Cofounder and agent for the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1831) and its president (1841–63), he favored a peaceful separation of the North and South. To dramatize his contempt for the U.S. Constitution's acceptance of slavery, he publicly burned a copy in Framingham, Mass. (1854), but as a pacifist he opposed the actions of John Brown and others who supported violence. With the end of the Civil War and slavery, he turned his passions and energies to crusading for such reforms as prohibition, the plight of Native Americans, and, above all, women's rights. In 1840, when the world's antislavery convention met in London, he had refused to attend sessions because women were excluded.
The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Garrison, William Lloyd

 

Born Dec. 12, 1805, in Newburyport, Mass.; died May 24, 1879, in New York. American political figure, journalist, and poet.

From 1831 to 1865, Garrison published The Liberator, a weekly that played an important role in the development of the abolitionist movement. He initiated the establishment of a society to combat slavery (1832). During the Civil War (1861-65), having united with revolutionary circles of abolitionists, he fought actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Garrison’s literary works were also devoted to the struggle against Negro slavery.

R. F. IVANOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
Cain, William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator, (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1995), 1-2.
(7.) See Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics (New York: Pantheon, 1967); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (Boston: St.
8.9.1: Draw on biographies to explain the abolitionist movement and its leaders (e.g., role of the Quakers and Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Rush and the First Abolition Societies, John Quincy Adams and his proposed constitutional amendment, John Brown and the armed resistance, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, William Jay, Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Redmond, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Crispus Attucks, Phyllis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker).
Benjamin were staunch members of the slave-holding elite; and, to top it all off, northern abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison were mainly evangelical Christians who regularly trafficked in standard anti-Semitism.
At a time when abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery "covenant with death and an agreement with hell," Spooner responded with a powerful book rifled The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845), making him a hero to the anti-slavery Liberty Party and a major influence on the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.
Jacoby explains that when an influential northern minister advised Presbyterian churches "to prohibit discussion of slavery that might break 'silken ties' between northern and southern Presbyterians," William Lloyd Garrison pointedly observed that the silken ties in question "are literally the chains of slaves" (p.
Neither were founders of the New England Antislavery Society,nor (with the exception of celebrated orator Wendell Phillips) did they become as famous as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.
In New Bedford, Douglass attended church and abolitionist meetings, continued his self-education and read the Liberator, a newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The Changing View of Frederick Douglass," 246-250; and "Frederick Douglass Changed My Mind about the Constitution," 251-252) argued that during the course of his long and distinguished career, Frederick Douglass broke with the position held by William Lloyd Garrison and radical abolitionists that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, "a covenant with death," and an "agreement with hell."
Grandson of noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, he helped found the NAACP and wrote "The Call," an historic document published on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth
Of Kunta Kinte and William Lloyd Garrison. Of Luther King and Rosa Parks.
THE purpose of this brief article is to discuss the prophetic role of the jeremiad, as John Greenleaf Whittier used William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, to respond publicly to the Christian church and entire nation for sinful actions or indifferent inaction regarding the institution of American slavery.
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