Still, William

1821
July 14, 1902

Abolitionist William Still was the eighteenth and last child born to former slaves near Medford, Burlington County, New Jersey. His mother had escaped from a plantation in Maryland, and his father had bought his own freedom. Still worked on his family's farm until he was twenty, when he went to work for neighboring farmers. He had little formal education and was largely self-taught. In 1844 he left for Philadelphia, where he spent three years working at a number of odd jobs.

Still became involved with the abolitionist movement in 1847, when he was employed by the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Three years later he was named chair of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, the clandestine wing of the Abolition Society that organized the city's Underground Railroad. Still and the committee helped shelter fugitive slaves stopping in Philadelphia on the way to Canada. One of the slaves he helped was his brother, Peter Still, who had been left behind by his mother during her escape.

While working with the Pennsylvania Society, Still gave material aid to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and housed Brown's wife after the raid. Still also worked as the Philadelphia distribution agent for the national abolitionist paper the Provincial Freeman. He discontinued his abolitionist work in 1861 but remained affiliated with the society for the remainder of his life.

During the Civil War Still devoted himself to business ventures; he opened a store that sold stoves, he sold provisions to black soldiers stationed at nearby Camp William Penn, and he started a successful coal business. In the late 1860s he led a successful campaign to end discrimination on Philadelphia streetcars, helped organize a research organization to collect data about African Americans, and played for the all-black Philadelphia Pythians baseball team, which was denied entry into a white league.

In 1872 Still published an extensive account of his work with fugitive slaves, The Underground Railroad, one of the few memoirs of this kind written by an African American after Emancipation. The book portrays the runaway slaves as courageous, even heroic figures and their escape to freedom as an act of self-determination. Still's work was published in three editions and was the most widely circulated nineteenth-century history of the Underground Railroad.

In the late nineteenth century Still developed several modestly successful businesses and continued to devote himself to black social causes. In the 1870s and 1880s he supported local reform candidates, organized a YMCA branch for black youth, served on the Freedmen's Aid Commission, and helped manage homes for African-American elderly and orphans.

In the early 1880s Still was one of a group of older black leaders in the Northeast who left the Republican Party to encourage black political independence and support of Democratic candidates when such support was advantageous to African Americans. Despite his extensive political activities, Still advocated economic self-improvement over politics as the best course for black advancement.

In 1888 Still and his son-in-law, Matthew Anderson, a prominent black minister and businessman in Philadelphia, founded the Berean Building and Loan Association, which provided loans to black home buyers. Still served as the association's first president. From 1896 to 1901 he also served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, which after 1865 continued to work for African-American rights and added "and for Improving the Condition of the African Race" to its title. Still died in Philadelphia in 1902.

See also Abolition; Underground Railroad

Bibliography

Buckmaster, Henrietta. Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement (1941). Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.

Hendrick, George, and Willene Hendrick. Fleeing for Freedom: Stories of the Underground Railroad As Told by Levi Coffin and William Still. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.

Lane, Roger. William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Still, William. The Underground Railroad (1872). New York: Arno Press, 1968.

thaddeus russell (1996)
Updated bibliography