Peter Thomas Stanford
Peter Thomas Stanford (February 21, 1858 – May 20, 1909) was an African American religious minister and writer, born enslaved near Hampton, Virginia. His enslavers orphaned him after selling both of his parents to other plantations before he had turned five years of age. As an orphaned child, he likely lived briefly among the Pamunkey Native American Tribe before the Freedmen’s Bureau sent him to be adopted by a white family in Boston in 1866. His adoptive family abused him. As a stowaway in the coal box of a train in 1871 (possibly aged 13 or 14 years old), Stanford self-emancipated from this captivity and arrived to freedom in New York City. Over the course of his life, he became an influential post-bellum antislavery activist, writer, and philanthropist in America, Canada, and England.

After escaping the horrors of his childhood, Stanford spent three decades preaching against slavery and racial violence. He published opinion pieces, sermons, and essays prolifically in the post-bellum transatlantic press. Stanford is the author of two memoirs:"The Plea of the Ex-Slaves Now in Canada" (1885) and "From Bondage to Liberty" (1889) as well as three editions of the textbook titled "The Tragedy of the Negro in America" (1897, 1897, 1903). Influenced by other Black activists, particularly Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass, his writings are part of a legacy of African American antislavery literature between abolition and the Harlem Renaissance.
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