Today as we approach the official commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, it seems an appropriate time to pay tribute to the handful of 19th-century North Shore residents who helped pave the way for the great civil rights leader's work a century later.

Foremost in this group is William Lloyd Garrison, who was born in Newburyport in 1805.

As a young man, Garrison served an apprenticeship under a printer and upon its conclusion, landed a job at the Newburyport Herald. By the age of 20, Garrison had risen to the post of editor.

In 1828, Garrison began working in Boston, and it was there that he came into contact with the editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, Benjamin Lundy. Garrison quickly fell in with Lundy and helped to edit the Quaker's abolitionist paper.

When he attacked a local merchant and slaver, the Newburyport native was thrown in jail for libel. His imprisonment radicalized him even further, however, and upon his release, Garrison started his own newspaper, The Liberator. Beginning with a circulation of only a few thousand, it would become a powerful national voice for abolition, suffrage, pacifism and temperance.

The now-impatient Garrison condemned anyone, be they slaveholders, politicians, clergy or other editors, who did not agree with his call for "immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves." In the early 1830s, Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society and helped organize similar efforts throughout the country.

When the Civil War finally commenced, Garrison changed his pacifist stance and supported the Union cause. He continued publishing The Liberator until 1865 when the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was passed into law.

One of the many North Shore residents to be influenced by Garrison was the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) of Haverhill. After working as an editor at a number of publications out of the area, Whittier returned to Haverhill in the early 1830s and became involved in the abolition movement. His activism led to the poet's election to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835 and, the following year, to the position of secretary of the National Anti-Slavery Society.

From 1838 until 1840, when a pro-slavery mob burned its offices and equipment, Whittier served as editor of the abolitionist paper the Pennsylvania Freeman in Philadelphia.

After relocating to Amesbury, Whittier threw himself into writing anti-slavery and anti-war poems that would appear in abolitionist publications across the country. His "Moloch in State Street" was an attack on the "top citizens" of Boston who helped authorities capture a runaway slave to protect the relationship between the slave owners in the South and their own cotton mills. A later poem, "Arisen at Last," is Whittier's celebration of the passage of a Massachusetts law in opposition to the oppressive Fugitive Slave Act.

Whittier had little use for churches and clerics who did not join the abolition movement and frequently attacked them in poems with titles like "Official Piety" and "Christian Slaves." One of his most poignant abolitionist works was "The Farewell," in which a woman says a tearful goodbye to her children who have been sold as slaves.

During his activist years, Garrison was a frequent visitor to the Salem home of John Remond, an African American who moved to the community in 1798 and who would play an important role in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

John's son, Charles Lenox Remond (1810-73), also took up the anti-slavery cause and for many years was considered the "most prominent man of color" in the United States. A gifted speaker, Charles joined the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1838 and, over the next few decades, traveled throughout the northeastern United States, lecturing and organizing anti-slavery societies where none existed.

Remond, like Garrison, also took up the cause of rights for women. As a result, the Garrison-Remond faction was marginalized and stripped of much of its power in the anti-slavery movement. But Charles continued traveling throughout the British Isles and the United States, spreading his message of equal rights for all. When the Civil War began, he enlisted in the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment, one of the all-black regiments under the command of Col. Robert Shaw.

Charles's younger sister, Sarah Parker Remond (1826-1894), also grew up attending abolition lectures and joined the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1856 she participated in an important lecture tour that also featured her brother Charles, Susan B. Anthony and the noted abolitionist Wendell Phillips.

Sarah Remond spent the Civil War years in England. Her brilliant oratory and devoutly moral anti-slavery message made her a highly sought-after speaker in the British Isles, where slavery had already been abolished. Her talks attracted as many as 2,000 people at a time, most of them white, and often led to important resolutions, newspaper articles, financial contributions and other types of support for the American abolitionist movement.

Remond's work helped limit the natural relationship between the powerful British textile interests and the cotton growers in the Confederate states, and kept it from developing into military and diplomatic support for the South.

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Jim McAllister of Salem writes on the history of the North of Boston region.