James Pembroke / James W. C. Pennington

James Pembroke was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and sent by his owner, Frisby Tilghman, to Rockland, south of Hagerstown in Washington County. There Jim learned the skills of a blacksmith.

He escaped from slavery on October 28, 1827, going first to Pennsylvania, and later moving to New York and Connecticut. He became a minister and changed his name to James W. C. Pennington.

As the first black pastor of New Haven’s Dixwell Avenue Church, he attempted to obtain a Yale education to receive a ministerial license. Yale refused to allow him to enroll in the seminary or take books from the library, but did allow him to audit classes, and this way he obtained the educational requirements to be licensed as a Congregational minister. He was also an influential abolitionist.

In his 1849 autobiography The Fugitive Blacksmith, Or Events in the History of James W.C. Pennington he wrote:

My feelings are always outraged when I hear [ministers] speak of "kind masters", "Christian masters", "the mildest form of slavery", "well fed and clothed slaves," as extenuations of slavery; I am satisfied they either mean to pervert the truth, or they do not know what they say. The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness, are its inevitable consequences to a greater or less extent, warring with the dispositions of men...