A Dedham school teacher, Sophia Foord, participated in many of the social reform movements of the mid-19th century. In the 1840’s she was secretary of William Lloyd Garrison’s Non Resistance Society, who with Hopedale’s Adin Ballou, was a forerunner in the development of the doctrine of non-violent civil disobedience, profoundly influencing Tolstoy, Gandhi. and Martin Luther King Jr.