William Still was born in 1821 in New Jersey, born free, though his parents had both suffered as slaves. He was the youngest of 18 children. He didn’t have much in the way of formal education, but he taught himself to read and write. In 1847 when he was 26 years old, he started working for the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Founded in 1775, it was the oldest abolitionist society in the country and Benjamin Franklin once served as its president. William Still became the chairman of the “Vigilance Committee,” which provided direct aid to slaves who had escaped and reached Philadelphia. He raised money to help runaways and make their journeys easier. He even helped Harriet Tubman financially. In fact, William Still is sometimes called the “Father of the Underground Railroad.” He helped as many as 800 slaves escape and he opened his home as a hiding place for them. Not only that – he got to know every slave that he met and he recorded their stories. He knew that their lives and their struggles mattered and he was determined not to let their lives be lost to history. In 1872, Still published a book of their stories – one of the few early histories that portrayed slaves as having courage, daring, and fortitude.
But before all this – before he was the chairman of the Vigilance Committee and a bold rescuer of others, he was a simple clerk. And in 1850, when he was 29 years old, he met a man named Peter. Peter was an escaped slave, telling William his story. Peter said that his father had bought his way out of slavery in Maryland, but his mother had not been able to do so. Many years before, Charity had tried to escape from slavery in Maryland, but she was caught along with her four children. For her next attempt, she took only her 2 daughters with her and managed to reach her husband Levin in New Jersey. Tragically left behind, Peter explained that he and his brother Levin, Jr. were eventually sold to slave owners in Kentucky and then resold to a man in Alabama. Levin, Jr. was caught visiting his wife without permission from his slave owner. He was whipped so severely that he died.
At the age of 50, Peter managed to escape and he came to the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery to find his mother and father or any other members of his family. William listened to Peter’s story with shock and amazement. After learning how Levin, Jr. had died, William proclaimed, “What if I told you I was your brother!” Peter’s story was one that William knew very well because it was his parent’s story, too. Their parents had struggled for years to find and free their two oldest sons, but they were lost – seemingly forever. After Peter met William, he was reunited with his mother after a separation of 42 years and he met all of the rest of his 16 brothers and sisters that he didn’t even know that he had…
Just imagine telling someone how lost you feel, how alone, how unreachable, only to have them say as William Still did, “What if I told you I was your brother!” “What if I told you I was your sister!” What if isolation is a myth and the idea of being unforgivable, irredeemable, hopeless – what if that was a lie that we don’t have to believe anymore?1
[i] https://freedomcenter.org/heroes/william-still/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Still
https://exhibits.temple.edu/s/william-still/page/william-still—s-national-sig
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/petition-from-the-pennsylvania-society-for-the-abolition-of-slavery-to-the-first-congress-1790