PHILADELPHIA -- When Kip Jacobs, 63, was growing up in West Philly, his great-grandmother was the only family member who talked much about their ancestor James Forten, a free Black man who became a wealthy sailmaker in post-Revolutionary War Philadelphia.
“I knew that he had saved nine people from drowning in the Delaware, according to my great-grandmother, Daisy Parker,” Jacobs said. But there wasn’t much talk about abolitionism, or Forten’s old friends, like Absalom Jones, founder of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, or William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator newspaper.
Grandmother Parker, Jacobs added, “would say that he was a famous man, he was a businessman.” But that was about it. “Mind you, I just caught glimpses of this. She was 90 when I was 5 or 6.”
