For years, she was a historical footnote in Philadelphia’s story of abolitionism. Finally, she’s getting her due.

In the winter of 1773, 29-year-old Dinah Nevil, a woman with Indigenous, African, and European ancestry, arrived in Philadelphia with her young children and made a remarkable claim — one that set her on a yearslong legal journey, changed the course of her family’s life, and jump-started the nation’s first white abolition society.

That winter, Nathan Lowry of Flemington, N.J., sold Nevil and her family to Benjamin Bannerman, who intended to transport them to Virginia. Bannerman was a slave trader, whose wife placed an ad in the Virginia Gazette in 1768, chronicling his abusive behavior. Two years before the American War for Independence, Nevil and her four children left Flemington, either because Bannerman directed her to move or because Nevil sought asylum, and traveled to Philadelphia, 50 miles away.

Upon reaching the city, sources agree, she asserted that she and her children were free people. In 1773, there were about 945 enslaved persons in the greater Philadelphia area. Twenty years before that, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting – an organization providing guidance to its Quaker meeting worship groups – had directed Quakers to disown members who bought or sold Africans, and encouraged members who enslaved people to release them from enslavement.

Amid this effort, Nevil’s claim was taken seriously.

Mayor William Fisher, a Quaker merchant, placed her in a workhouse at Third Street and Elbow Lane (near what is now the Ben Franklin Museum and a parking lot), where two of her children died, possibly because of the poorhouse’s deplorable conditions.

A group devoted to her cause, calling themselves the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, hired lawyers to argue for her rights, in a case that would last months and then years.

That group, later known as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, focused on banning slavery, assisting those who were kidnapped into enslavement, and supplying financial support and education to free communities of color. The PAS, the nation’s first white abolition society, was at one time led by Ben Franklin, who (though he continued to enslave people), in 1790 petitioned the U.S. Congress to ban slavery.

In 1775, the court permitted Nevil to live on the 90-plus-acre property at 42-49th Street, between Marshall Road and Haverford Avenue and owned by tailor Thomas Harrison. Harrison, a constable in Philadelphia’s Middle Ward, was also one of the Quakers petitioning for Nevil’s freedom. In 1779, he purchased Dinah for 225 pounds, and promptly signed a manumission (a promissory freedom document) conferring immediate emancipation to her and her children.

A painting, The Manumission of Dinah Nevil (1795), commemorates this event, depicting her as a pale, nearly naked woman kneeling beside a posse of upstanding, fully clothed white men. Behind her are two dark-skinned people. It was painted by Jeremiah Paul, a Philadelphia Quaker whose father was affiliated with Nevil’s case.

Despite her pivotal role in the founding of Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Nevil is rarely mentioned in its papers, and if so, it’s as an “an anonymous Indian woman,” according to the academic Kirsten Sword.

But in more recent decades, a new image — and understanding — of Dinah Nevil has emerged.

Earlier this year, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania used AI to create another portrait of Nevil for its exhibition, “Free, As One: Black Worldmaking in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers.” This image showed a fully clothed woman, seated at the edge of a forest, accompanied by two fully clothed, attentive young children, gazing out past the viewer.

The organizer Morgan Lloyd, a historian with Afro-Indigenous ancestry, and cofounder of 1838 Philadelphia Black Metropolis, a movement to reclaim, rewrite, and restore suppressed or forgotten Black histories, sought to render her “recognizable to those with Lenni-Lenape heritage with deep roots in New Jersey.”

To accomplish that, Lloyd said, she fed late 18th- and 19th-century photos of Lenni-Lenape women into AI to generate an image of Dinah Nevil that reflected her ancestry.

Starting in November 2024, and continuing through May 2025, another historian, the reparative genealogical project 339 Manumissions and Beyond’s Shamele Jordon scoured the archives for documents of Nevil’s life.

The project’s purpose, founder Avis Wanda McClinton said, was to answer questions regarding, “What happened to these newly freed Americans and how they survived?”

As one of the organization’s main researchers, Jordon, who helped curate the Historical Society of Pennsylvania exhibit “Voices of the Community: Local Black Preservation,” on view through Sept. 26, has been tasked with uncovering the fates of the people named in the 339 Quaker manumission documents that were digitized in 2020 by Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges and, if possible, trace their descendants.

Jordon and other genealogists have already pursued the fates of more than a dozen people named in the documents, but Nevil’s manumission stands out. Not only did her pursuit of freedom launch a protracted court case, and subsequently an abolition society that persists to this day, but she was not actually enslaved by Thomas Harrison, her manumitter.

According to her research, five years after Nevil’s symbolic likeness was rendered in Paul’s painting, her son, Bontury Nevil was named head of household in the 1800 census in Goshen in Chester County. The census indicates that a woman of Nevil’s age was also living on the premises.

Jordon has been able to trace Dinah’s life through multiple generations.

Bannerman fought for the right to enslave Nevil and her children for almost a decade. She lost two children in the process but won freedom for herself and her descendants.

“It’s shocking how significant Dinah is, and to not have her name out there, and never talked about,” said Jordon. “We all want the simple story — we all want Black and white. She was mixed race — it adds to the story of who she is.”

Her story, Jordon said, shows how precarious life was for people of color “who were taken advantage of, who were forced into servitude.”

“But Dinah said, ‘No.’ And she won.”