Born in England in 1682, Benjamin Lay was an early and radical Quaker abolitionist. Disputes arose between Lay and the church in the 1720s. He was expelled from two English Meetings. Lay and his wife lived briefly in Barbados before settling in Philadelphia in 1732. Barbados exposed Lay to large-scale plantation slavery, after which abolition became the focus of his activism. His firebrand reputation followed him to Philadelphia, where many Quakers were enslavers. Though denied membership in a Quaker Meeting, he disrupted services to rail against slavery, sometimes with spectacular theatrical gestures. In 1737, Benjamin Franklin printed for Lay a scathing antislavery pamphlet. Its uncompromising position earned an official condemnation from the Quaker church. Philadelphia Quaker churches excluded him during his lifetime, but Lay’s perseverance moved the church to change its stance on slavery. Though the shift was incremental and inconsistent at first, by 1776, New Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers were prohibited from owning slaves. In the later 1700s and 1800s, abolitionism grew to have a central place in Quaker belief and activism.

Lay was noted for his small stature and unusual physical proportions resulting from dwarfism and curvature of the spine. Lay was also a vegetarian who rejected commodities such as sugar, which were produced by the labor of the enslaved.