Amy Matilda Cassey Redmon

Artwork Credit: Diaz, D. (2020) Amy Matilda Casey. Personally Commissioned by Loren Cahill.

Amy Matilda Cassey Redmon spent her life asking two questions, “What is the cost of freedom? and How is it paid?” While everyone in her immediate family was born free, including her parents, children and husbands. Amy could not rest until slavery no longer existed. She never failed to remember, she was tethered to enslaved folks even if their shackles looked different than her own. Her libertory pursuits had many different campaigns. She got her parents, Sarah and Rev. Peter H. Williams Jr, to host delegates for the Antislavery Convention of American Women at their New York City home. She radicalized her first wealthy husband, Joseph Cassey, Perfumer, Wigmaker, Real Estate Mogul. Together they supported advocacy efforts for African American repatriotization to the diaspora including Haiti. With her late Husband’s large estate, Amy remarried Charles Redmon, one of the nation's leading anti-slavery activists and help to fund abolition, migration and education for African Americans. She helped to increase educational equity br fundraising for her dear friend, Sarah Mapps Douglass’s Negro Girls School in Philadelphia. She was no stranger to the importance of rearing and educating children in a manner that not only increases their freedom and taught them to be of service for others. Amy birthed eight children, but she mothered, mentored and offered refuge to even more than that. She is most well known for her Friendship Album (Click this hyperlink to view the full length text.) which was composed with hand paintings, verse and prose created by her network of fellow freedom dreamers. Her album ensured that connections would remain and their labor towards abolition never ceased. I find it important to uplift that she was a co-founder of Gilbert Lyceum, an all Black salon space that sought to advance social reform for our race. Gilbert Lyceum became a rotating living room undercommons for deep study and fugitive planning for Black Philadelphians. Amy died at age 46, eight years before the Emancipation Proclamation was decreed. I was saddened to learn that she did not get to see her dream realized. I was even more distraught to discover despite the varied scope and breadth of her work, an existing picture of Amy remains unknown to archivists today. I tenuously pieced together her story by learning about the lives of those closest to her who were pictured, advertised, and published. The following is an instagram post (the modern day friendship album) written by evoking Amy.

Image Description: The Cassey House, 243 Delancey Street, Philadelphia where Gilbert Lyceum meetings routinely occurred.

Instagram Post

We are learning that freedom isn't free.

And love like this is rare.

Comrades fitting to build a dream with

is what the Lyceum laid bare.

We read and studied.

We educated and paid funds.

We cartographed underground maps as alternatives until the new world had begun.

If one day our folks forget what we look like, where we lived, what we did & what we said.

We offer this album as a rememory

to guide you past all sorrow and dread.

Know that doing right is hard.

But your freedom is nearer than you know it to be.

You must continue to fast and pray.

We know this journey to abolition is long.

But we need you beloved.

Do not be led astray.

-- 🖤 --