The Fearless Benjamin Lay cover art

The Fearless Benjamin Lay

The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist

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The Fearless Benjamin Lay

By: Marcus Rediker
Narrated by: Cornell Womack
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About this listen

The little-known story of an eighteenth-century Quaker dwarf who fiercely attacked slavery and imagined a new, more humane way of life

The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man - a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labor, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life.

©2017 Marcus Rediker (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Americas Christianity Revolution & Founding United States Fantasy

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All stars
Most relevant
Had to give up at chapter 4. the glimpses you get of his life may be interesting but you have to wade through hours of dull administrative info: acronyms, processes, petty bureaucracy. And the narrator reads it with all the passion of a satnav. It makes it painful. Listening with my partner, he leaned over and pressed the pause button exclaiming, "it's just boring". Annoyingly audible will not let me return it, so my advice is, don't waste the credits. If you want to know about the man, I think a quick Google or some time on tiktok will suffice.

Benjamin Lay deserved better

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