Henry Highland Garnet, a Presbyterian minister, was born enslaved in 1815 and escaped from slavery in Maryland nine years later. Garnet reached New York, where he attended the New York African Free School and eventually became a Presbyterian minister. Becoming very active in the anti-slavery cause, he believed in the support of white abolitionists in the fight for freedom. He declared: “They are our allies-Ours is the battle.” Garnet was inspired by David Walker’s Appeal (1829), and at a convention in 1843, stated to the enslaved African American community: “You had better all die immediately than live lives as slaves and entail wretchedness upon your posterity. Where is the blood of your fathers? Has it run out of your veins? Awake, awake, millions of voices are calling you. Your dead fathers speak to you from their graves.”

The convention however, did not endorse Garnet’s radicalism, and he eventually turned more to religion while Frederick Douglass assumed the role of premier black abolitionist. Garnet went on to serve in a number of Presbyterian churches, but at the same time began to support the emigration of African Americans to Liberia in the 1850s. He continued to lecture in England and Scotland, and then traveled to Jamaica in 1852 to work as a missionary. In 1881, Garnet was appointed the minister to Liberia; however he died two months after his arrival in 1882.