Felix Holbrook
b. Africa, 1743 - 1794
Felix Holbrook was a prominent Black activist who spearheaded the first organized collective movement for legal abolition in American history. Enslaved in Boston for over twenty-five years before gaining his freedom in 1775, Holbrook served as the lead organizer for a committee of enslaved men that included Peter Bestes and Sambo Freeman. Between 1773 and 1774, he submitted a series of anti-slavery petitions to the Massachusetts General Court. His historic January 1773 petition directly urged the legislature to grant enslaved people their freedom and the right to own property, explicitly arguing that white colonists could not justly demand their own liberty from Great Britain while keeping others in chattel slavery.