This season, Americans of all cultures struggled with Thanksgiving feelings of gratitude and celebration while watching the continuing frustration, heartbreak, and anger in Ferguson. For Absalom Jones, an African-American abolitionist and clergyman in the late 18th and early 19th century, thankfulness and charity were key to keeping hope alive for those who had little reason for hope, and he pushed for a day of thanksgiving decades ahead of President Lincoln's 1863 holiday proclamation.
After founding a black congregation in 1794, Jones was the first African American ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church of the United States, in 1804. He is listed on the Episcopal calendar of saints and blessed under the date of his death, February 13, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer as "Absalom Jones, Priest, 1818."
Jones was born into slavery in Sussex County, Delaware, in 1746. When he was sixteen, he was sold to a storeowner in Philadelphia, Pa., and one of the store's clerks taught him to write. While still a slave, he married Mary King on January 4, 1770, and by 1778, Jones had purchased his wife's freedom so that their children would be free. In another seven years he was able to purchase his own freedom.
In 1772, while at St. George's Methodist Church, Absalom Jones and other black members were told that they could not join the rest of the congregation in seating and kneeling on the first floor and instead had to be segregated first sitting against the wall and then on the balcony. After completing their prayer, Jones and the church's black members got up and walked out. He co-founded the Free African Society, a non-denominational mutual aid society, to help newly freed slaves in Philadelphia.
In 1808, preaching in Philadelphia, Jones urged a national day of thanksgiving. He proposed reserving Jan. 1, for the special celebration, because Jan. 1, 1808, was the day Congress banned the further importation of slaves. On that day of remembrance, Jones maintained, "the history of the sufferings of our brethren" should survive down "to the remotest generations."