A key event that would eventually lead to the slavery of Africans in the New World happened shortly after Columbus completed his journey to the Americas in (1492). Queen Isabel of Spain declared that all indigenous peoples in the lands Columbus had discovered were to be considered her subjects. This decree saved Native Americans from being made slaves by the Spanish, but it also meant that Spain would have to look elsewhere for the cheap labor it needed to fully exploit the vast natural resources the New World had to offer. Along with Portugal, Spain found its solution in the slave trade then existing in various parts of Africa, and began the shipping of African slaves to the Americas by 1501. By 1650, there were over 200,00 Africans in Mexico and Peru alone.
One of the most successful entrepreneurs of early colonial times was Anthony Johnson, a tobacco farmer who in (1662) became the first free black man in North America. Johnson came of age in Accomack County in the colony of Virginia. His mother was an African, and Johnson worked on a tobacco plantation until adulthood. On the same plantation he met his wife Mary, and once Johnson was able to buy their freedom, the couple raised their two sons as free men. Actually, Johnson eventually acquired five servants for himself, which at that time then qualified him to purchase a 200-acre land grant along the Puwgoteague River in Virginia. There, he founded the first independent African community in North America, which at its peak included 12 homesteads of other free black families.
In a room on Second Street in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery met on April 19, (1775), becoming the first American institution to formally condemn slavery. Included among its members were Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush. Many of the organization's other members were active Quakers. As early as 1652, Quakers in Pennsylvania had passed a resolution against lifetime indenture. In the Pennsylvania Society, they worked effectively for an abolition law in their state, along with other laws to protect free blacks from kidnapping by slave traders. In 1790, the Pennsylvania Society presented Congress with the first petition calling for emancipation and an end to slavery. Benjamin Franklin was the Society's president at the time, and presenting that petition was the last public act he performed before he died.
Vermont became the first state in the Union to outlaw slavery. (1777)
One of American history's great religious leaders, Richard Allen was a slave who bought his own freedom at the age of 20 and was known as a talented preacher by white and black congregations alike. Allen started the Bethel Church in Philadelphia, and there, on April 9, (1816), he helped establish the first all-black religious denomination in the United States. The African Methodist Episcopal Church became one of the most influential autonomous institutions for blacks. It was a church that understood and answered the specific needs of its members, most of whom were former slaves. The A.M.E. Church, as it became known, established schools and aid societies and dispelled the notion that many free blacks relied on white charities to get by. By the time of the Civil War, the A.M.E had grown to over 1,600 congregations across America, and for the next hundred years its leaders remained at the forefront in the struggle for equal rights. In fact, it was two A.M.E. pastors, Oliver Brown and J.A. Delaine, who filed the legal suits against school segregation that eventually led to the landmark Supreme Court decision of "Brown vs. Board of Education" in 1954 and marked the beginning of the end of "separate but equal" laws in America.
In Mobile Bay, Alabama, the Clothilde became the last slave ship from Africa to stop at an American port. (1859)