George Boyer Vashon
George Boyer Vashon was an American scholar, poet, and abolitionist.
He was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the third child and only son of an abolitionist, John Bethune Vashon. In 1840, at age 16, he enrolled in Oberlin Collegiate Institute, and in 1844 he became its first African-American graduate, and the valedictorian of his class.
He was the first practicing African-American lawyer in New York State and was posthumously admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 2010, 163 years after being denied the right to practice in the state due to his race, first in 1847 and again in 1868. In 1853, he was a prominent attendee of the radical abolitionist National African American Convention in Rochester, New York. His was one of 5 names attached to the address of the convention to the people of the United States published under the title, The Claims of Our Common Cause, along with Frederick Douglass, James Monroe Whitfield, Henry O. Wagoner, and Amos Noë Freeman. In 1853 he joined the faculty of New York Central College, near Cortland, New York, as a replacement for exiled William G. Allen. In 1857, he married Susan Paul Vashon. In the 1870s he lived and worked for a time in Washington, D.C., where he also taught young African Americans at a night school there.
Vashon High School, in St. Louis, Missouri, is named for Vashon and his son, John Boyer Vashon.
