William Cooper Nell

An abolitionist, journalist, publisher, and author, William Cooper Nell (1816-1874) played a leadership role in the struggle to integrate schools and public facilities in Massachusetts. 

Committed to racial and social integration more broadly, Nell worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison, the White abolitionist leader. As a young man, he apprenticed at The Liberator, Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, and later wrote for it. 

Nell moved to Rochester, New York temporarily to work as co-publisher of abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass’ newspaper, The North Star, which became the voice of Black abolitionism. Nell helped found two organizations, the New England Freedom Association and the Boston Vigilance Committee, to assist people who had fled slavery in the South and were at risk of being returned to bondage under the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act. 

In addition, Nell authored The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), a painstakingly researched history of African American involvement on the Patriot side of the revolution. He was inspired to write the book by the refusal of the Massachusetts state legislature to erect a monument to Crispus Attucks, a man of Native American (Nipmuc) and African descent who had escaped slavery. He was shot by the British in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. Today, Attucks is generally regarded as the first American martyr of the revolution; before Nell’s writings, he had been all but forgotten.

Photograph above: Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.