Amy Matilda Cassey’s second husband, Charles Lenox Remond, was born in 1810 in Salem, Massachusetts, to John and Nancy Remond. His father was a black immigrant from Curacao who became a barber and then a caterer with the help of his wife. Remond’s parents were both abolitionists. His father was a member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Association, which Charles Lenox joined in 1838.
Remond began a career as a public speaker at the age of 17, often travelling with his sister Sarah Parker Remond who was also a lecturer.. Remond was an agent for several abolitionist and black newspapers: first The Liberator and then the Weekly Advocate and the Colored American. He was selected to be the American Anti-Slavery Society’s delegate for the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Remond was the first African American to address a state legislature committee, delivering his speech Rights of the Colored Person in Traveling at the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1842 to protest racial discrimination on railways and steamboats. Later in his lecturing career, he began to call for abolition by force if necessary. He was recruited for the US Colored Troops during the Civil War and helped man early units of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. After the Civil War he worked as a street lamp inspector and a clerk at a U.S. Customs House, but he continued to lecture protesting racism. He joined the American Equal Rights Association, founded by Lucy Stone in 1867. When he died of tuberculosis in 1873 at the age of 63, his death was noted in both the New York Times and the Boston Transcript.