WILLIAM WHIPPER -NON VIOLENT ADVOCATE

excerpt from A SALUTE TO BLACK PIONEERS VOL. III, An Empack "Black History" Publication Series

"William Whipper, a leading Black intellectual, was a famed abolitionist, shrewd businessman, and banker.  He was also one of the earliest advocates of the non-violent movement in America, twelve years before Thoreau wrote his famous essay on civil disobedience, and a hundred years before Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, ajr. made the theory world-famous.

"He was born in 1805, the son of a Columbia, Pennsylvania White businessman.  His mother was a Black domestic slave in his father's household.  He was raised in his father's house and was treated much the same as his White half-brother.  Early in life, he was given the opportunity to acquire sound principles of financial investment and management.  His father left him a small lumberyard when he died.  With his partner, Stephen Smith, Whipper built a successful wholesale business which expanded to other cities in Pennsylvania....

Smith became one of the wealthiest Blacks in America because he devoted his energies only to the business aspect of their partnership; conversely Whipper chose to share his wealth with the Black movement.  In 1870, Whipper stated: "I would prefer to be penniless in the streets, rather than have withheld a single hour's labor or a dollar from the sacred cause of liberty, justice, and humanity."  He gave considerable sums of money to help Black slaves and to aid the Union during the Civil War.  In 1880s, Whipper devoted much of his personal time and money to the Negro Convention Movement, the first nationwide effort by Blacks to plead their cause in America.

Whipper, the forerunner of Thoreau, Ghandi and Dr. King advocated moral suasion and non-violence.  He wrote a famous article, entitled An Address on Non-Resistance to Offiensive Aggression, which was published in the Colored American.  In it, he claimed that non-violence "is not only consistent with reason, but the surest method of obtaining a speedy triumph of the principles of universal peace."  William Whipper died in 1885, but his doctrine of non-violence is still practiced by many present-day congtemporaries."