A marker commemorating Swisshelm’s childhood home is on the former Gimbel’s building next to the Duquesne Club, 325 Sixth Avenue

Martin Delany, among the most important African American figures in our nation’s history, spent more than 20 years in Pittsburgh. A fierce opponent of slavery, he was admitted to study medicine at Harvard and became a journalist, novelist and founder of an abolitionist newspaper, The Mystery. In 1850, he urged resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law at a mass meeting in Allegheny City, (Pittsburgh’s North Side). Many white workers understood that black slavery undermined the status of free labor. Delany explored the Niger River in Africa and Abraham Lincoln named him the highest-ranking black officer in the Union army.

Martin Delany marker, 5 PPG Place, 3rd Avenue and Market Street

Jane Grey Swisshelm, journalist and founder of an anti-slavery newspaper in Pittsburgh, won the right for women to control property they brought into a marriage. She was the first female given a place in the reporter’s gallery in Washington but was exiled because of her caustic and passionate writing. “In the nation’s capital lived some of our most prominent statesmen in open concubinage with negresses, adding to their income by the sale of their own children … indisputable testimony of the truth of Thomas Jefferson’s statement:  ‘The best blood of Virginia runs in the blood of her slaves.’”

Jane Grey Swisshelm marker, Braddock & Greendale Avenues, North of 1-376 exit 9, Edgewood