Benjamin Franklin

(gentle music) -

Deborah

I went to hear the Negro children at church. There were 17 that answered very prettily indeed, and five or six that were too little, but all behaved very decently. It gave me a great deal of pleasure and I shall send a fellow to the school. -

Narrator

Deborah Franklin had enrolled a fellow, an enslaved child in the Franklin household, in a new school in Philadelphia, part of an effort to educate Black children in North America that Benjamin Franklin had endorsed. At Deborah's urging her husband made a personal visit to the school. -

Franklin

I was on the whole much pleased. And from what I then saw have conceived a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the Black race than I had ever before entertained. Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children. You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it and I will not undertake to justify all my prejudices, nor to account for them. I think a major turning point in Franklin's life was when he visited that classroom. He did not like Black people when he was a young man. There's no way of getting around that. It's very distasteful to say, but it's true. He had once written that the hardest thing for a man to do is to change longstanding prejudices of belief, but to succeed in doing it is a test of one's humanity.