nish. In 1831, Virginia was convulsed
and the entire Southland shocked by the Insurrection of Nat. Turner. In
the State of Ohio along the Kentucky border, the feeling against the free
Negro had become acute. Mobs occurred, blood was shed and the people were
compelled to look to some spot where they could abide in peace.

It was in these stirring times that the Convention movement which means
the marshalling of the moral forces within the Negro came into existence.
The forces which it evoked were conserved and correlated until the
dynamics of Civil Revolution had wrought desolation and destruction far
and wide, sweeping away forever what had been a basis of the social and
political strength of the Nation.

Prior to this time, there had been a local convention held in
Philadelphia, January, 1817, to protest against the action of the American
Colonization Society that had been organized to remove systematically from
this country all the free colored people in the United States. A glance at
the list of the officers of this, the pioneer deliberative convention of
colored people of which we have as yet any date, shows that the men who
led in this meeting as in the movement of which this paper is a study,
were among the foremost colored citizens whose names have come down to us
from that distant past. James Forten was President, and Russell Parrott,
the assistant to Absalom Jones at St. Thomas, P. E. Church, was the
Secretary. Prominent also in this anti-colonization convention, were
Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, Robert Douglass, Francis Perkins, John
Gloucester--the first settled pastor of a colored Presbyterian
Church--Robert Gordon, James Johnson, Quanmany Clarkson, John Summersett
and Randall Shepherd.

The convention which assembled in 1830 and was the first conscious step
toward concerted action, was in no sense local either in its conception or
its constituency.

The prime mover was Hezekiah Grice, a native of Baltimore, where he was
born just one hundred years ago. In his early life, Grice had met Benjamin
Lundy, and in 1828-9, William Lloyd Garrison, editors and publishers of
"The Genius of Universal Emancipation," published at that time in
Baltimore.

In the spring of 1830 he wrote a circular letter to prominent colored men
in the free states requesting their views on the feasibility and
imperative necessity of holding a convention of the free colored men of
the country, at some point north of Mason & Dixon's li