Amos Gerry Beman, a Black minister in New Haven, Connecticut, was a national leader during the mid-nineteenth century. He was a proponent of abolition, suffrage, temperance and educational and moral reform. Beman grew up in Colchester, Connecticut and later Middletown, Connecticut, where his father, Jehiel Beman, was appointed pastor to the first African American church in Connecticut. Beman’s father had worked tirelessly for emancipation and civil rights, and his grandfather, Caesar Beman, had been manumitted after serving in the Revolutionary War. The Collection