ABSTRACT
The 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation was celebrated in 2013. One hundred years after President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 decree, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and 200,000 people of all races, nationalities and creeds joined in the March on Washington at the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Proclamation. Fifty years after the 1963 March, and 150 years after Lincoln's announcement, hundreds of thousands joined — again in Washington — in August 2013. Two months before, in Paris, a two-day international conference titled ‘The Atlantic Worlds of Anthony Benezet’ was held. Then in November, Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love held a symposium titled ‘ “Anthony Benezet, Equally Entitled to Freedom” Benezet Then, Benezet Now’, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of a man who must be considered the father of the international fight against slavery and the slave trade, and to explore the meaning of Benezet's life in the 21st century. In his first anti-slavery pamphlet A Short Account of that Part of Africa (1762), Benezet made a call for giving Blacks ‘a debt due to them’, on account of their years of slavery and persecution. 1 Today the call for repatriations has taken on new meaning. 2
