Prior to this time, there had been a local convention held in Philadelphia, January, 1817, to protest against the action of the American Colonization Society that had been organized to remove systematically from this country all the free colored people in the United States. A glance at the list of the officers of this, the pioneer deliberative convention of colored people of which we have as yet any date, shows that the men who led in this meeting as in the movement of which this paper is a study, were among the foremost colored citizens whose names have come down to us from that distant past. James Forten was President, and Russell Parrott, the assistant to Absalom Jones at St. Thomas, P. E. Church, was the Secretary. Prominent also in this anti-colonization convention, were Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, Robert Douglass, Francis Perkins, John Gloucester--the first settled pastor of a colored Presbyterian Church--Robert Gordon, James Johnson, Quanmany Clarkson, John Summersett and Randall Shepherd. The convention which assembled in 1830 and was the first conscious step toward concerted action, was in no sense local either in its conception or its constituency. The prime mover was Hezekiah Grice, a native of Baltimore, where he was born just one hundred years ago. In his early life, Grice had met Benjamin Lundy, and in 1828-9, William Lloyd Garrison, editors and publishers of "The Genius of Universal Emancipation," published at that time in Baltimore. In the spring of 1830 he wrote a circular letter to prominent colored men in the free states requesting their views on the feasibility and imperative necessity of holding a convention of the free colored men of the country, at some point north of Mason & Dixon's line, for the exchange of views on the question of emigration or the adoption of a policy that would make living in the United States more endurable. For several months Grice received no response whatever to this circular. In August, however, he received an urgent request for him to come at once to Philadelphia. On his arrival there he found a meeting in session, discussing conflicting reports relative to the openings for colored people as emigrants to Canada. Bishop Richard Allen, at whose instance he was in Philadelphia, subsequently showed him a printed circular signed by Peter Williams, the rector of St. Phillips Church, New York, Peter Vogelsang and Thomas L. Jennings of the same place, approving the plan of convention. This approval decided the Philadelphians to take definite action, and they immediately "issued a call for a convention of the colored men of the United States to be held in the city of Philadelphia, on the 15th of September, 1830."