- This event has passed.
The 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project
October 15, 2023 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Please join the Barnegat Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) as we host a presentation led by Avis Wanda McClinton, The 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project.
Join the event by Zoom or in person at our meetinghouse, 614 East Bay Avenue, Barnegat, NJ 08005, Sunday, October 15, 2023 at 1:00 pm Eastern time.
* There is no cost to you for this event. If you wish, you may make a contribution to 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project or to Barnegat Friends Meeting.
To repair is to fix what was broken. The history of Quakers as slaveowners contains much damage and breakage. The 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project is a Quaker-led reparative project. It seeks to restore the family histories of those descended from people enslaved by Quakers and answer the question: What happened to these newly freed Americans and how did they survive?
“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” – James Baldwin
Questions? Write to events@barnegatquakers.org.
For news of future events, visit us on the web and Facebook.
Presentation Team Biographies
Avis Wanda McClinton is a spirit-led African American Quaker living in southeast Pennsylvania. She is a Quaker Preservationist and the founder of Honoring Those Known Only to God, a group of people who identify and memorialize the enslaved Africans owned by Quakers who are interred Quaker graveyards.
As the Community liaison with the Haverford College research project, Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers Research Project, she concluded that further research was needed to determine what happened to the 339 enslaved persons who were manumitted by Quakers in the late 1700s after they were freed. It is her questions about these people and their ancestors that guide this project.
Kitty Mizuno is a retired teacher, born to generationally Quaker parents in Philadelphia, and raised on the Taylor Farm in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, which has been operated by her father’s family since 1720. Kitty now lives in Watsonville, California. She has a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a Master’s degree in teaching from Yale University. She has lived and taught English as a second language, primarily in Camden, New Jersey, and in Tokyo, Japan.
Kitty has recently learned that the manumission papers for Celia and Cesar, enslaved by Jonathan David Evans, her 4X great grandfather on her mother’s side, were signed by him on January 27, 1779. These manumission papers are among 339 such documents prepared by slave-holding Philadelphia Quakers, most probably to avoid being disowned by their Meetings, and are held in the Haverford College Library’s Quaker and Special Collections.
David Satten-López is an American Library Association Spectrum Scholar and the former Morris Evans Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at Haverford College, where he led the project to create the website Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers. David is a recent graduate from the master’s in information sciences program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.