The next year the first international convention was held in Paris. In 1853, the first YMCA for African Americans was founded in Washington, D.C., by Anthony Bowen, a freed slave. That same year the Y arrived in North America: It was established in Montreal on November 25, and in Boston on December 29. By 1851 there were 24 Ys in Great Britain, with a combined membership of 2,700. He and a group of fellow drapers organized the first YMCA to substitute Bible study and prayer for life on the streets. George Williams, born on a farm in 1821, came to London 20 years later as a sales assistant in a draper's shop, a forerunner of today's department store. Outside the shop things were bad - open sewers, pickpockets, thugs, beggars, drunks, lovers for hire and abandoned children running wild by the thousands. They slept crowded into rooms over the company's shop, a location thought to be safer than London's tenements and streets. They worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week.įar from home and family, these young men often lived at the workplace. Growth of the railroads and centralization of commerce and industry brought many rural young men who needed jobs into cities like London. The Young Men's Christian Association was founded in London, England, on June 6, 1844, in response to unhealthy social conditions arising in the big cities at the end of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1750 to 1850). Our History - A Brief History of the YMCA Movement
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