The National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum commemoration ceremonies for the 2016 inductees to the Hall of Fame will be held Saturday, Oct. 21, 2017, at NAHOF, 5255 Pleasant Valley Road,
Peterboro. The inductees are Rev. John Gregg Fee, Beriah Green, Angelina Grimké and James W.C. Pennington. This is the last year of the two-year induction-commemoration cycle.

This is the last year of the two-year induction-commemoration cycle. Beginning in 2018, inductions and commemorations will be completed in one year.

Fee will be presented during the afternoon Abolition Symposia at noon by Alicestyne Turley, Ph.D., director of the Carter G. Woodson Center for Interracial Education, Berea College, Berea, Ky. Turley and Lyle Roelofs, Ph.D., president of Berea College, nominated Fee to the Hall of Fame. Roelofs was formerly
with Colgate University in Hamilton. Turley will be traveling with students from Fee’s college for the
commemoration.

Fee was born in 1816 as the eldest son of a slaveholding family in Bracken County, Kentucky. At the age of 26, Fee enrolled in Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and became fully converted to the
cause of immediate abolition. Fee sold Indiana land given to him by his father and used the funds to purchase the freedom of Jullet Miles, the black woman that cared for him as a child, and to establish his first anti-slavery ministry on Cabin Creek in Lewis County, Kentucky. In 1855, as a resident of Madison County, Kentucky, Fee and members of his church founded the town of Berea and Berea Institute, which became Berea College in 1859.

Berea was the first college in the South devoted to the co-education of men and women, blacks and whites. As an anti-slavery advocate born into a slaveholding family below the Mason-Dixon Line, Fee promulgated his non-violent, anti-slavery views in a hostile environment with little support for protections from the law, family, friends or association at the height of America’s most violently aggressive proslavery and anti-slavery period.

The other three inductees will also be presented during the afternoon Abolition Symposia: Milton C. Sernett will present The Odd Couple: Beriah Green and Gerrit Smith at 1:00, Louise Knight will present The Remarkable Transformation: Angelina Grimké’s Journey at 2, and Christopher L. Webber will present James W.C. Pennington: Pastor and Abolitionist.

During the 7:00 pm Saturday Commemoration Ceremonies Dr. Turley will briefly describe the legacy of Fee as an inductee to the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum. Relatives, friends and associates who are sponsors of Fee’s inductee banner for the Hall will introduce themselves and their relationship to Fee. The sponsors will unveil the banner to be installed in the Hall. The Fee banner will include Fee’s official NAHOF portrait created by artist Melissa Moshetti, biographical information, his abolition legacy, and the name of the sponsors.

By martha

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