Thomas Peters (black leader)

Thomas Peters (c. 1738 – 25 June 1792) was an African American slave who fled North Carolina with the British during the American Revolutionary War and later ended up as a leader in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Peters fled his owner's flour mill in Wilmington, North Carolina, and joined the Black Pioneers, an unarmed Loyalist unit made up of runaway slaves who had been promised their freedom by the British in exchange for supporting the war effort against the Colonial American colonies which had rebelled (modern United States). Peters rose to the rank of sergeant in the regiment. After the war, he and other former slaves fled to Bermuda then Nova Scotia with the British Loyalists, where they stayed from 1783 to 1790. In 1790, he went to London, where he helped to convince the Royal government with the help of Granville Sharp to establish the colony that eventually became Sierra Leone. After convincing 1,100 of the 3,500 Canadian blacks to return to Africa, Peters died of malaria in Freetown during the first rainy season in 1792.

In 1988, Peters was honored by the Sierra Leonean government for his work in founding Freetown as a founding hero.

In 2007, Percival Street in Freetown was renamed in honor of Peters