In Pursuit of Knowledge

Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America

Kabria Baumgartner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479802579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Uncovers the hidden role of girls and women in the desegregation of American education

The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story's origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women.

In their quest for education, African American girls and women faced numerous obstacles—from threats and harassment to violence. For them, education was a daring undertaking that put them in harm's way. Yet bold and brave young women such as Sarah Harris, Sarah Parker Remond, Rosetta Morrison, Susan Paul, and Sarah Mapps Douglass persisted.

In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America. In this thought-provoking book, Baumgartner demonstrates that the confluence of race and gender has shaped the long history of school desegregation in the United States right up to the present.

PART I

What Our Minds Have Long Desired

1 / Prayer and Protest at the Canterbury Female Seminary

On a walk around the village green of Canterbury, nineteen-year-old Sarah Harris (Figure 1.2) might have spied the large, two-story, Federal-style building that housed the Canterbury Female Boarding School. She and her family had recently moved to the area. Her father, William Montflora Harris, born in the West Indies, emigrated to the United States, likely during the Haitian Revolution. He settled in Norwich, Connecticut; married Sally Prentice, who was of Mohegan and European descent; and raised eleven children.1 In January 1832 he purchased a farm in Canterbury, which dates the family’s arrival at that village. About seventy free blacks resided in Canterbury in 1830, constituting less than 4 percent of the village’s population.

Sarah and her siblings likely received their early education at Sunday schools.2 They may have gone to the public primary schools in Canterbury too, which, like some other small towns and villages in Connecticut, allowed African American and white children to attend together. In urban areas such as Hartford, however, public primary schools were racially segregated. In any case, a boarding school was different. Operated by Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker woman, the Canterbury Female Boarding School enrolled twenty young, middle-class and elite white women from the Windham County area. The Board of Visitors, an eight-member, all-white, all-male board consisting of lawyers and politicians, praised Prudence’s teaching.3 The young female students enjoyed their experiences; years later, two former students reminisced about “the many pleasant moons we have spent together under the chesnut [sic] tree studying our definitions.”4 While these young women studied English grammar, natural and moral philosophy, and music and drawing, among other subjects, Sarah labored as a servant in the house of her white neighbor Jedediah Shepherd.5

But in September 1832, only eight months after arriving in Canterbury, an ambitious Sarah asked for admission to Prudence Crandall’s all-white school. Her goal, she explained, was to get “a little more learning, enough to teach colored children.”6 What inspired Sarah to reject servitude and push for advanced study? We cannot know for sure, but possibly a recent lecture had inspired her. That same month, Maria W. Stewart, an African American lecturer, delivered a speech about servitude at Franklin Hall in Boston, which was later printed in the Liberator, an antislavery newspaper edited by the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Stewart asserted that African Americans “ha[d] dragged out a miserable existence of servitude from the cradle to the grave.”7 Perhaps her words resonated with Sarah, a servant herself, and also a reader of the Liberator. Sarah’s father and her brother, Charles, both circulated the newspaper, and Sarah once described it as a “welcome visiter [sic]” in her home.8 Sarah’s rather modest personal goal—to acquire enough learning “to teach colored children”—thus suggests not simply a personal ambition but also a communal mission to see free blacks move beyond a position of servitude.

Prudence weighed Sarah’s request carefully.9 She suspected some of her white students might bristle at the idea of attending classes with a young African American woman, but Sarah’s earnestness prevailed. “If I was injured on her account I would bear it,” Prudence resolved, and she agreed to admit Sarah.10 And bear it she did, for Sarah’s admission completely unsettled the village of Canterbury. The parents of the white students held a meeting with Prudence and demanded that she dismiss “the nigger girl.”11 When they threatened to withdraw their daughters, Prudence pushed back, reopening the school in April 1833 exclusively for African American girls and women. Now the school’s stated purpose was to train young African American women as teachers.12

FIGURE 1.1. Sarah Harris (1812–1878) was the first African American student to desegregate the Canterbury Female Boarding School in Connecticut in 1832. The controversy surrounding her admission led to the establishment of the Canterbury Female Seminary for African American girls and women in April 1833. Sarah later married George Fayerweather and settled in Kingston, Rhode Island. Courtesy of the Prudence Crandall Museum. Canterbury, CT.

This reconstituted female seminary faced bitter opposition from white residents such as Andrew T. Judson, a Connecticut state attorney and politician who fervently supported the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 to resettle African Americans in Liberia. Hence the very idea of educating young African American women instead of young white women—not to mention devoting an entire school to the task in the United States—conflicted with Judson’s colonizationist views. Opposition from white residents intensified over a seventeen-month period, with verbal threats, legal action, and finally violence, which led to the school’s abrupt closure in September 1834.13

How did African American girls and women individually and collectively contest this escalation of white opposition and racism in Canterbury? Writings from several students at the seminary published in the antislavery press provide a glimpse into their thoughts and actions. These writings, consisting of speeches and letters, cite scripture, praise God, and highlight the power of Christian love. Canterbury’s African American students evoked and implemented an ethic of Christian love, which included biblical principles to “love God” and “love thy neighbor.” This ethic was neither meek nor militant but rather, I argue, an act of social protest. Just as historians have analyzed moral suasion and other ideologies as foundational tactics in antebellum social movements, so too must we recuperate African American women’s self-developed ethic of Christian love.14

Perhaps most remarkable is that these young women espoused an ethic of Christian love amid the looming threat of violence. Instead of citing biblical passages from Exodus, commonly referenced by African American ministers, these women turned to the Gospel of Mark, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of John—scriptures emphasizing love that enabled them to argue for inclusion and belonging. Time was of the essence since they wanted to remain at Prudence’s school. These students bound their communal project of learning with an appeal to the minds and hearts of the white Christian men of Canterbury. They decried white wrongdoing, all the while urging their opponents to do right: to love. In turning to a discourse that counseled compassion for the very people trying to thwart them, these young women transformed the seminary into a significant site for African American women’s activism.15

Before Prudence Crandall (Figure 1.2) established her all-white boarding school, the Rhode Island native had attended the New England Friends School, a well-known Quaker boarding school in Providence. There she met classmate Abby Kelley, later a staunch antislavery and woman’s rights activist. Prudence decried the sinfulness of slavery but had yet to identify the struggle for African American education as part of her own mission. She later admitted that she had been “entirely ignorant” of the experiences of northern free blacks. Before coming to Canterbury, she had lived in nearby Plainfield, Connecticut, where she ran a school for young white women. Impressed with her initiative, training, and curricular emphasis on literature and writing, some Canterbury citizens, including Judson, recruited her to establish a school for young white women in the area. Samuel Hough, a white factory owner, loaned her the money to buy the school building, and the school opened in 1831.16

FIGURE 1.2. This portrait of Prudence Crandall (1803–1890) was painted by Francis Alexander in 1834. Prudence was a white abolitionist from Rhode Island and the proprietor of the Canterbury Female Seminary in Connecticut. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

The Canterbury Female Boarding School fit firmly within the tradition of the female seminary movement. This movement began in the Revolutionary era as leading white intellectuals, including Benjamin Rush and Judith Sargent Murray, raised concerns about the twin goals of forming the national character and developing a unified citizenry. These concerns helped to accelerate support for widespread schooling of both young white men and women at colleges and seminaries, respectively. In 1787 Rush, a white physician, political leader, and educator in Philadelphia, delivered a speech, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” at the Young Ladies’ Academy. He proposed a curriculum of English language and grammar, writing, bookkeeping, geography, and history to “prepare [women] for the duties of social and domestic life.”17 This proposal stressed the usefulness of a woman’s advanced learning to manage household affairs, to influence her husband, to promote the well-being of her family, and to engage in intellectual conversation. Rush and other leaders cast women as central actors in stabilizing the nation and seminaries as sites of meaning-making and cultural production.18

From 1790 to 1860 more than 350 female seminaries and academies were founded in the United States.19 Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, a white female educator and writer, observed in 1837 that seminaries were “institutions of a permanent and elevated character” that were “fast multiplying” across the nation.20 While a few poor and working-class white female students received tuition scholarships, most of the students who attended female seminaries were twelve- to eighteen-year-old young white women from middle-class and elite families who could afford the tuition and room and board.21 Hence only a small percentage of the population could actually avail themselves of these institutions. The historian Margaret Nash asserts that female seminaries “played an [important] role in class formation and consolidation.”22 For instance, material conditions and cultural values like self-improvement and morality defined middle-class status and were often reinforced at seminaries and academies.23

Nineteenth-century educational advocates argued that both white men and women possessed intellectual abilities in need of refinement, even though these groups would occupy different roles in the nation. The rationale for women’s pursuit of advanced education focused on notions of usefulness and intellectual growth, with gender ideology an important but not singular consideration. To be sure, proponents of female seminaries such as Rush emphasized that educated women would make good wives and mothers.24 The explosion of religious revivalism and the emergence of the market revolution further stimulated the growth of female seminaries, and the seminary movement would soon become a watershed in the history of white women’s education.25

But like other educational movements of the day, the female seminary movement did not serve African American girls and women, a fact that angered many African American activists and their allies. In 1830 the free black population in the United States stood at 300,000, with over 40 percent located in the free states and territories of the North.26 Whether in urban areas or small towns, African Americans confronted discrimination, and the schoolhouse was no exception. Some public schools barred African American children from attending. Only a small number of African American men were admitted to colleges and universities. The female seminary fared no better. A letter on women’s education, signed by a person named Matilda and featured in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper, simultaneously praised the emerging national dialogue claiming that the mind had no sex while lamenting the fact that racial prejudice qualified the dialogue. “We possess not the advantages with those of our sex whose skins are not colored like our own,” Matilda declared.27 As the national dialogue went, the mind had no sex, but it certainly had a race.28

Female seminaries endorsed a racialized and gendered model of republican citizenship; an unspoken requirement for admission was whiteness, apparently even before sex.29 For example, the Albany Female Seminary in New York enrolled both young white women and “small [white] boys.”30 In the early nineteenth century, coeducation at seminaries and academies was not unusual, but racial integration was.31 Hence white women applicants to seminaries and academies such as Bradford Academy in Massachusetts had to be ladies of “good character”—a seemingly amorphous category with specifically racialized assumptions about who did and did not qualify.32 So when white women attended these seminaries, they inhabited predominantly white female spaces.33

Though called a boarding school, Prudence Crandall’s school was, for all intents and purposes, a female seminary.34 Female seminaries typically offered a three-year course of study in English language and literature, reading and composition, arithmetic, geography, history, natural and moral philosophy, and botany, as well as electives such as drawing and music. William Russell, an instructor of reading at a Massachusetts-area female seminary, extolled the virtues of this standard curriculum, which would enable a woman to “acquit herself aright, to whatever social duty she may be justly called.”35 The female seminary was thus an academically rigorous environment, and the Canterbury Female Boarding School offered all of these subjects and even added chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, and French.

In these white female sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Purposeful Womanhood
• Part I. What Our Minds Have Long Desired
• Part II. God Protect the Right
• Conclusion: Going Forward
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A. List of Black Students at the Canterbury Female Seminary in Connecticut
• Appendix B. List of Black Students at the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary in New York
• Appendix C. List of Black Families in the Northeast
• Appendix D. Physical Attacks on Black Schools in the Northeast, 1830–1845
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author