"Sarah Parker Redmond" (June 6 1826- December 13 1894).

Was best known for the abolitionist speeches she presented in Great Britain on the eve of the American Civil War.She was among the last of prominent black abolitionist who, as the historian R.J.M. Blackett established, traveled to Britain in order to create "a moral cordon" or "antislavery wall" against British and continental European support for slavery or for the Confederate States of America. Sarah was also notable for her feminism and her late, poorly documented career in Italy as a physician.Sarah was born in  Salem,Massachusetts.The seventh of eight children in a prosperous family, she enjoyed advantages available to few others of her race and gender during the antebellum period.Her mother,Nancy Lenox Redmond,a skilled baker, was the daughter of a black Revolutionary War veteran, who by 1798 owned property in Newton,Massachusetts.Her father John Redmond, had at age ten migrated by himself to Salem from the Caribbean island of Curacao. Beginning as a delivery boy, he became a successful barber and later, with Nancy Lenox Redmond's help a prominent restaurateur, caterer, and retailer. John and Nancy Redmond were, by the late 1820s, active abolitionist, influenced by David Walker's Appeal...to the Coloured Citizens of the World and later by William Lloyd Garrison, who frequently visited their home.Aside from her family's wealth and antislavery activism, several factors shaped Sarah character as she grew up in Salem and Newport Rhode Island, during the 1830s and early 1840s.First, like other prosperous African Americans, her parents were committed to educating all of their children, girls as well as boys. They sent her to local public schools and supplemented her education with readings in English literature and a variety of antislavery publications. Second, Sarah did not escape the effect of racial prejudice. When white protest persuaded Salem officials to establish a segregated school system in 1835, Sarah parents withdrew their daughter and moved temporarily to Newport, where she attended a black private school.Third, like other members of her family, she joined the Salem Female Antislavery Society and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS), both of which were racially integrated and favorable to women's rights as well as abolitionism.Fourth and perhaps most importantly, her elder brother Charles Lenox Redmond, who lived from 1810 to 1873,encouraged her to become something more than a local activist. In 1838, he became the first black MASS agent. Prior to the rise of Frederick Douglass, he was the leading black antislavery orator in the United States.Charles not only set an example for Sarah as a public speaker, he also introduced her to the antislavery lecture circuit, preceded her as an American antislavery agent in Great Britain, and in 1840, became and advocate of women's rights.Sarah emerged as an antislavery activist when she was in her late twenties. In 1853 she successfully sued a Boston theater owner after he ejected her because of her race.In 1856, at age thirty, she joined her brother and several prominent white abolitionists in a lecture tour across New York. Through the others were experienced speakers, Sarah's "calmness, dignified manner, her winning personal appearance, and her earnest appeals to the conscience and heart"impressed her auditors. In May 1858 she spoke at the National Woman's Rights Convention in New York City. These activists led directly to her trip to Great Britain.Accompanied by the white abolitionist Samuel J. May,she arrived in Liverpool in January 1859.Between then and 1861 she presented at least forty-five feminist antislavery lectures to enthusiastic gatherings in England,Ireland, and Scotland.In 1860 she drew an audience of two thousand at Edinburgh. One report suggested that the rarity of black female speakers made her popular, though Sarah "eloquent and thrilling"delivery no doubt were also attractive.To increase British antagonism to American slavery, Sarah explained the sinfulness of slavery, described its negative effect on whites as well as blacks,and denounced American politicians who supported it. She ridiculed the Fugitive Slave Law, revealed the oppression suffered by free African Americans, and praised John Brown's abolitionist raid at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. But her main appeal was to women.She stressed the "sufferings and indignities...perpetuated on her sisters in America,"the licentiousness of masters, and the destruction of black families."If English women and English wives knew the unspeakable horrors to which their sex were exposed on southern plantation,"she declared, "they would freight every westward gale with the voice of their moral indignation, and demand for the black woman the protection and rights enjoyed by the white."Sarah attracted enough attention to her cause that in November 1859 the American legation in London punished her by refusing to grant her a visa to travel to France.According to the head of legation,she was not under the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott Sandford  (1857)-  a United States  citizen.After the beginning of the Civil War, at which time the American government became friendlier toward her activities,Sarah spoke out against British recognition of the Confederacy.In 1864, she helped establish the London Ladies Emancipation Society, and in 1865, she worked with the British Freemen's Aid Association.Yet her life in Britain gradually drew her away from social activism and American reform.In 1860 she studied language, literature, and history at London's Bedford College for Ladies. She returned briefly to the United States. In 1865. The following year she returned to England to take up nursing. Not long after, she traveled to Florence, Italy,where she studied medicine at the Santa Mari Nuova Hospital. She became a physician in 1871. In 1877 she married a Sardinian named Lazzaro Pintor. Although abolitionist associates occasionally visited her in Florence, little is known about her later years.After her death, she was buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.