Mini Jawns: Phebe Lewis

According to the 1838 Black Metropolis, civil rights organizations predate the NAACP and even the Emancipation Proclamation by decades. In early 19th-century Philadelphia, Phebe (FEE-BEE) Lewis’s Daughters of Africa and other “beneficial societies” protected Black civic and economic interests. That was easier said than done before the end of slavery, but the work begun by groups like Lewis’s continues today.