Editing Free Black Community (section)

== Challenges and Resistance ==

Despite its achievements, Philadelphia's Free Black Community faced constant challenges. Legal discrimination excluded Black Pennsylvanians from voting (after 1838, when a new state constitution explicitly restricted suffrage to white men), from serving on juries, and from many occupations. Social discrimination barred them from hotels, theaters, streetcars, and other public accommodations. Economic competition with Irish and other immigrants often erupted into violence—the [[Nativist Riots of 1844]] targeted Catholics primarily but also threatened the Black community, and periodic anti-Black riots destroyed homes and businesses throughout the antebellum period. Most terrifyingly, kidnapping posed a constant danger; free Black Philadelphians were seized on the streets and sold into slavery in the South, with limited legal recourse.<ref name="bacon">{{cite book |last=Bacon |first=Margaret Hope |title=But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis |year=2007 |publisher=SUNY Press |location=Albany}}</ref>

The community responded with organized resistance. The Pennsylvania Augustine Society, the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, and other organizations worked to protect community members from kidnapping and to assist those who escaped slavery via the [[Underground Railroad in Philadelphia]]. [[William Still]] coordinated much of this activity from his office at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Petitions, protests, and organized campaigns challenged discrimination—the successful streetcar desegregation campaign of 1867, led by Octavius Catto and William Still, demonstrated that organized action could achieve results. The community's resistance tradition would inform later civil rights struggles and establish Philadelphia as a center of African American activism.<ref name="nash"/>