Thus, Garrison's argued that emancipated and free blacks were entitled to be citizens --- they were African Americans. Despite differences, Garrison and the moderates agreed on one fundamental point: Both believed that blacks were less equal to whites. In arguing for gradualism and colonization, the moderates of the American Colonization Movement assumed that African Americans could not fully integrate into American society; they were just not as able, as equal. In arguing for increased rights for African Americans, Garrison made clear that he believed in legal equality, but not social equality. And consistent with the attitudes of his race, he preferred light-skinned to dark-skinned blacks, and he hesitated to admit African Americans into his Anti-Slavery Society. Thus, both the moderates and Garrisionites neither embraced nor argued for total racial equality. They simply did not interpret Thomas Jefferson's words that "all men are created equal" as including the African American population in the Untied States. It took the voices of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass to make the rightful claim of total racial equality part of the national debate on slavery. .
The ten-day National Negro Convention began in Philadelphia on September 15, 1830. The Blacks at the convention wanted to end slavery and gain equal rights as citizens in America. The goals discussed at the National Negro Convention in Philadelphia corresponded with the goals of the African American abolitionists. .
The astonishing lives of Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass proved African Americans had a natural claim to the opportunities American society had to offer. Douglass's life story refuted the proslavery accounts; even so, he declared, his years in bondage would be deemed blissful by many slaves laboring in the Deep South. Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist, women's rights activist and preacher who challenged injustice whenever she came across it.