"Garnet suggested the best way to visualize the bright future of 'the colored people' was to depict the glorious past of Africa." -The African Diaspora (2001)
"No one in the US had fought more creatively for freedom." - An African American and Latinx History of the U.S. (2018)
"Considered the most revolutionary of African orators." - 100 Greatest African Americans (2010)
"Perhaps the most commanding and electrifying force in the abolitionist world of 1843." - Educated for Freedom (2020)
"Garnet will ever be an inspiration to the young men of the race." -Men of mark (1887)
"Garnet's 'The Past and Present' was addressed to black audiences at a moment of global crisis." -Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (2017)
Sleeping in the woods and swamps and traveling all night, nine-year-old Henry Highland Garnet and his family would escape slavery in 1824 and later start a new life as freemen in New York. Garnet would be educated at the African Free School and other institutions and later became one of the commanding and electrifying forces in militant abolitionism.
Garnet was a prominent member of the movement that led beyond moral suasion toward more political action. Renowned for his skills as a public speaker, he urged black Americans to take action and claim their own destinies. In 1865, he delivered a sermon in the U.S. House of Representatives, "the first colored man who has on any occasion spoken in our National Capital," on the occasion of Congress's passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery.
In 1848, Garnet's speech "The Past and the Present Condition and the Destiny of the Colored Race" was published into a short 22-page book form. Garnet sought to bring to light the glorious past of Africans from biblical and historical sources to provide a template for allowing African-Americans to visualize a brighter future.
In setting out the background of this work, Garnet notes that:
"By an almost common consent, the modern world seems determined to pilfer Africa of her glory. It were not enough that her children have been scattered over the globe, clothed in the garments of shame — humiliated and oppressed — but her merciless foes weary themselves in plundering the tombs of our renowned sires, and in obliterating their worthy deeds, which were inscribed by fame upon the pages of ancient history."
In contrasting the ancient past glory of Africa to the ancient past of "Anglo Saxons," Garnet writes:
"At this time, when these representatives of our race were filling the world with amazement, the ancestors of the now proud and boasting Anglo Saxons were among the most degraded of the human family. They abode in caves underground, either naked or covered with the skins of wild beasts. Night was made hideous by their wild shouts..."
More about the author:
Henry Highland Garnet (1815 –1882) was an African-American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. Garnet attended the African Free School, Phoenix High School for Colored Youth, and the Oneida Institute. He served as missionary and educator in Jamaica; president of Avery College; Pastor of what is now St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem; and U.S. Ambassador to Liberia.
