BENJAMIN LAY

A fervent abolitionist and activist for human rights, Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was a Quaker living in the Philadelphia area in the early eighteenth century. Revolutionary for his time, he boycotted the use of any material associated with enslaved labor. Well aware that textiles were often sold and exchanged for enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world, instead he made his own clothing from carefully sourced, Pennsylvania-grown linen―one of the many ways he protested the institution of slavery pervading colonial trade systems.