The Future is Shaped by Human Choices
This is a story about how humanity is formed, how human stories disarm hatred, and how small choices create ripples that can change the world.
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This is the second post exploring the remarkable lives of Judith Benezet, her son Anthony, their wider family and connections.
There is so much in this story that it is worth exploring the various themes.
This is a story about how humanity is formed, how human stories disarm hatred, and how small choices create ripples that change the world.
Humanity is a performance multiplier
Join as a member, read and share Stories of Humanity, and help fund the next generation of young Champions.
1. Humanity is formed before it is expressed
Judith Benezet was a remarkable young woman and a remarkable human being.
She had real ‘Ubumuntu’.
She wore the badge, she was the badge!
She had grit, courage and a focus on what really mattered: people.
She was married at sixteen, into a wealthy merchant family and in one of the most notable churches in Paris.
I can only imagine what the dress would have looked like!
By every outward measure, Judith could have lived a life of comfort.
But, by 22, she fled for her life in the dead of winter, with her husband and 2 young children, losing everything, becoming a refugee.
Anger and resentment would have been normal and understandable reactions, with a deep-seated hatred for her perpetrators, French Catholics.
She could have infused this hatred into her son, into the DNA of his identity.
Yet she chose the opposite. She fed her son’s humanity rather than his bitterness. She shaped the person he would become.
History is shaped by small, deeply human choices
And this young man would become the person who would disarm 300 years of institutionalised hatred.
Judith shows that we are role models, to our friends and colleagues, our children, grandchildren and others.
The values and morals we show influence others, they are passed to young people, becoming the seeds of future transformation (or future hatred).
At the end of her life she gave funds to help stranded and destitute French Catholics, with Anthony dedicating his time and money to help them.
The very opposite of what we would expect.
Their lives were formed through small, important choices, choosing love over hate.
Evidenced through their humanity.
They bent the course of history.
Join as a member, read and share Stories of Humanity, and help fund the next generation of young Champions.
2. Human stories transform the human heart
Anthony Benezet did not challenge slavery only with outrage or opinion.
He gathered human stories that showcased Black humanity in all its wonder, using documented evidence, first-person accounts of those who had witnessed African life.
He changed what people could see, believe and were prepared to do.
The human stories he documented transformed people, transformed society and changed laws.
His work, his life enabled a new institutionalised framework centered on humanity.
“He wrote about African people not as abstract commodities, but as parents, farmers, neighbours and communities.”
3. The Ripple Effect Creates Impact Beyond Our Line of Sight
Anthony Benezet’s choices became connections, and these connections created world-changing ripples, ripples of humanity that transformed millions of lives
He opened a classroom for Black students in his home, including Absalom Jones, Richard Allen and James Forten, amongst others.
Not to mention the many others that his life and writings influenced, including Granville Sharp, John Wesley and Thomas Clarkson in Britain, and Benajmin Franklin in America.
Absalom Jones, born into slavery in Delaware, was brought to Philadelphia in 1762.
Seeking to advance his self-taught literacy, he eagerly attended Benezet's Quaker night school for Black people.
He co-founded the Free African Society, the first independent Black civic and mutual-aid organization in America. Jones went on to be ordained as the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church.
Richard Allen was enslaved in Philadelphia, a brilliant, self-educated young man who regularly attended Benezet's night school.
Allen founded Mother Bethel Church, and in 1816, he officially established the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, serving as its first consecrated Bishop.
Today, the AME church spans millions of members globally, standing as an immortal monument to the self-reliance Allen first cultivated in Benezet's evening class.
James Forten was a free Black youth born in Philadelphia who attended Benezet’s school, mastering advanced mathematics, composition, and logic.
Forten became one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia.
He used his immense fortune to act as the primary financial shield for the next wave of the abolition movement, single-handedly funding William Lloyd Garrison’s radical anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and securing legal protection for fugitive slaves.
The proximity between Benjamin Franklin and Anthony Benezet was both literal and profound.
For decades, they lived just a few blocks apart in downtown Philadelphia, moving in the same tight-ranging civic circles.
Franklin was the ultimate pragmatist and media mogul of his era, but Benezet operated as a relentless field of moral gravity right on his doorstep.
The defining ripple effect occurred in 1758 when Benezet convinced Franklin to personally walk into his schoolhouse for Black children.
Seeing their academic capabilities firsthand completely shattered Franklin's lifelong racial prejudices; he confessed that his assumptions of African intellectual inferiority were totally false.
This connection changed American history.
Decades later, Franklin, the former slaveholder, became the President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
In a beautiful closure of the circle, Franklin’s very last public act before his death in 1790 was weaponising his famous printing press and global prestige to sign a formal petition to the U.S. Congress demanding the immediate abolition of slavery, using the exact logic his humble neighbour had modelled decades before.
The story shows how one life, grounded in humanity, can generate ripples that move through classrooms, books, friendships and movements to help change history.
It shows how the future is shaped every day by the micro-choices we make in our families, workplaces and communities.
The ripple effect: goodness compounds when humanity is chosen, called forward, practised and passed on
Join as a member, read and share Stories of Humanity, and help fund the next generation of young Champions.
Every effort has been made to ensure historical accuracy. If you notice anything that needs correcting or clarifying, please let us know.
