Three blocks long and one-way west from the Wyndmoor train stop to Germantown Avenue, paralleled north and south by Willow Grove and Springfield Avenues, Bénézet Street perhaps has seen more trikes and baby strollers than passing cars. To generations of Hillers the lean, kiddie-cordial lane has been known affectionately as “Bassinet Street.”

Perhaps “Babies’ Way” would have been a better nickname, as the French émigré for whom the street is named - one of the 18th century’s greatest human rights activists - pronounced his name bay-nay-ZAY.

Antoine Bénézet (1713-84) came to Philadelphia by way of Rotterdam and London, the son of a well-to-do Huguenot family. Unorthodox Protestants in a Catholic land, they were forced to flee France to avoid religious persecution. Finding their convictions aligned with Quaker beliefs, they moved to Philadelphia in 1731, with introductions to the City of Brotherly Love from prominent London members of the Religious Society of Friends. About this time, Bénézet changed his name to Anthony, and became a member of the Society.

Disinclined to emulate his father’s trading career, Bénézet became a schoolteacher in Germantown in 1739 and soon obtained a position at the celebrated Friends’ English School Philadelphia, the oldest Quaker school in the world, known today as the William Penn Charter School.

Instructing children of prosperous families satisfied the needs of the merchant class, but for Bénézet, the Quaker values of the meeting house trumped those of the counting house. In 1750, he began holding evening classes in his home for the children of enslaved people, something he continued to do for the remainder of his life. Ultimately, he persuaded the Society of Friends to support free education for Black residents with the establishment in 1770 of the African Free School. The young Black scholars who studied there eventually founded the African Free Society in the house of Richard Allen - the same Allen for whom Allens Lane in Mt. Airy was recently renamed. 

Bénézet’s progressive educational initiatives alone would justify his eponymous recognition today. In addition to starting a school for Black residents, in 1754, he also founded the first public girls’ school in America. His incomparable achievement, however, was teaching powerful people on both sides of the Atlantic the value of abolishing slave holding and slave trading, recognizing the equality of races, and creating social and educational structures capable of aiding formerly enslaved people once abolition was accomplished. Such visionary achievement was unprecedented.

Quaker activists were among the first to condemn slavery and Bénézet decisively molded that discourse into a coherent moral philosophy. He drew his arguments from biblical authority, Enlightenment political theory, anthropology, economics, travel narratives, and African “oral histories,” and he distilled them into a powerful ideology that became the basis for all later abolitionist thought and action in America.

Bénézet was an acquaintance of nearly every contemporary Philadelphian of prominence. He exerted a transformative influence on Benjamin Franklin, persuading the former slaveholder to become the president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, successor organization to the one Bénézet had founded. He also cajoled Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, to pen (albeit anonymously) scathing antislavery tracts. 

Bénézet’s influence was not confined to the New World.  Abolitionism was an international movement, and contemporaries viewed him as its leader. English abolitionists universally hailed him “the father” of their movement, and his writings were authoritatively cited in British parliamentary debates. At its inaugural meeting in Paris, the abolitionist group Société des Amis des Noirs, (Society of the Friends of the Blacks in English), hailed “the immortal Bénézet '' as the “founder” of the world antislavery movement. He is said to have inspired Voltaire’s regret that only seasickness kept him from expatriating himself to Philadelphia.

In his adopted city, Bénézet’s tireless social activism matched his intellectual engagement. He intervened to prevent the transport of kidnapped Black residents throughout Philadelphia. He campaigned for prison reform, petitioned on behalf of Acadian refugees, advocated principles of nonviolence and pacifism, and protested the treatment of Native Americans. He was one of a handful of 18th century Americans to whom the term humanitarian could justly be applied.

Respected by the white establishment, Anthony Bénézet was revered by the Black community. Historians say that in his latter years, Bénézet walked the streets of Philadelphia with Gandhi-like gravitas. More than a century after his death, someone in Chestnut Hill named a little street for him, hoping perhaps to provoke posterity to discover why.

For further reading about Bénézet, look for the biography Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Bénézet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism by Maurice Jackson, and The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Bénézet, 1754-1783 edited by David L. Crosby. Contact John O’Donnellat Johno@chestnuthilllocal.com