John Pierre Burr was an American abolitionist and community leader in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, active in education and civil rights for African Americans. He was an illegitimate child of Aaron Burr, the third U.S. vice president, and Mary Emmons, a Haitian governess who may have been born in Calcutta, India.

Francis Johnson Webb was an American novelist, poet, and essayist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His novel, The Garies and Their Friends (1857), was the second novel by an African American to be published, and the first to portray the daily lives of free blacks in the North.