Benjamin Lay was his name. Long ago, when slavery was accepted by just about everyone as a brutal fact of life, this four foot tall man took it on. He saw its ugly face when he and his wife Sarah arrived in Barbados in the year 1718. The more the Lays saw of the cruelty of slavery, the more they spoke out against it. Horrified at the hypocrisy of their slave-owning Quaker friends, they were finally chased out of Barbados for confronting them.
Barbados is a long way from Philadelphia, but Benjamin found the same injustice there among his fellow Quakers. In 1738, he entered an Assembly of Quakers with a pig’s bladder full of pokeberry juice hidden in a hollowed out Bible. Standing to speak, he drew out a sword and pierced it through. The enslavement of Africans he declared to be “as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, as if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book”. Juice spattered everywhere. Lay turned and walked out, leaving behind indignation, and something else. The seed of change.
Twenty years later, not long before his death, news came to him that a new assembly of Quakers had voted to discipline any Quaker who traded in slaves. “I can now die in peace,” he said. Another Benjamin, Ben Franklin, gave Lay the credit for his decision to free his slaves. In 1807 the British Parliament abolished the slave trade. Who says that one person can’t make a difference?
