Benjamin Lay would not break bread with a slaver, and he would flat out leave and never speak with them again.
Lay invited a married couple's son to his home, making them panic all day of their missing child, and then revealed to them the boy is safe, but this is the experience of their young Black girl slave's parents from having their daughter stolen and enslaved.
Lay protested in September 1738 at the Quaker Meeting House of Burlington, New Jersey, during the Philadelphia area's biggest Quaker annual meeting event, throwing off his coat, revealing a military uniform and a large, gleaming sword. This was a drastic statement in an event filled with absolute pacifist Quakers. Lay decried the evils of slavery and hypocrisy of the audience who practiced it. Lay produced a thick book, inside of which was hidden a bladder filled with red dye made from pokeberry juice. With a dramatic flourish, he impaled the book with the sword, and fake blood ran down his arm, which he spurted on the slave keepers all around him. Outrage and clamor filled the meeting house, and several men grabbed Lay and carried him bodily from the building.
A year before Lay's death, a resolution was passed in the Philadelphia yearly meeting that would discipline and eventually disown slave owners from membership in the Society of Friends. Lay was able to pass away in peace knowing the seeds of the political movement he pushed, almost alone for his entire life while he was mocked and ridiculed, bore fruit.
Be like Lay, even if revolutionary change doesn't come within your lifetime. Be the one to sow the seeds of the death of bourgeois society. Be militant. ✊
