a beacon of liberty for free blacks has been shattered by historians writing about northern black activism.15 In particular, the Northeast, which includes six New England states plus New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, counted a little over 122,000 free blacks in 1830. By then, slavery was all but extinct in the region, but white supremacy thrived nationwide, leaving free blacks in a precarious position, to say the least. If not by law, then by custom, African American women, men, and children experienced disenfranchisement, racial discrimination in public accommodations, and economic insecurity. Facing this reality, free blacks established their own institutions, formed activist networks, and participated in reform movements from temperance and abolition to education.
The subject of African American women’s education in the United States often focuses on a single institution, Oberlin College, which adopted a policy to admit students, regardless of sex and race, in 1835. That same year James Bradley became the first African American man to attend Oberlin, and a year later Elizabeth Latta was probably the first African American woman to do so. Oberlin was indeed an important educational destination, so much so that some African American families moved to the area. For instance, Blanche V. Harris received her early education at public schools in Monroe, Michigan, before her family relocated to the town of Oberlin so that she and her siblings could attend the college.16 This college, as the historian Carol Lasser rightfully points out, was the “only institution of higher education in the [antebellum] United States to offer collegiate-level training to African American women.”17
But all roads did not lead to Oberlin College. In fact, the African American student population at Oberlin remained small, hovering around 4 to 5 percent of the total between 1840 and 1860.18 And most African American women students enrolled there hailed from the South and Midwest, not the Northeast.19 No doubt distance and, relatedly, cost were overriding factors. Maritcha Lyons, an African American teacher in New York, later reflected that she might have attended Oberlin, but for several reasons she changed her mind, including the “long distance—for so it was then—between myself and home [in New York].”20 An exclusive focus on Oberlin ignores the African American girls and women in the Northeast who were educational activists before Oberlin College even began accepting African Americans as students.
In addition to studies on Oberlin College, historians have explored the development of African American schools and literary societies, probed the rise of white opposition to African American education, and examined the struggle over racial segregation in public education, but none of this scholarship, with few exceptions, engages women or gender.21 Yet scholars of African American women’s history have shown that the everyday work of African American women influenced family, community life, and public culture in the nineteenth century.22 In Pursuit of Knowledge writes African American girls and women back into the history of early American education while also enlarging the scholarship on northern black activism. Exploring the dimensions of African American women’s educational experiences demonstrates that both race and gender shaped the struggle for equal school rights in the Northeast.
Indeed the quest for educational inclusion and equal school rights was one strand within the broader movement among African Americans for genuine freedom and equality. Sarah Mapps Douglass rejected repeated attempts by many whites to exclude African Americans from the body politic. She vowed to help build a truly democratic and multiracial republic, one child at a time. “Our enemies know that education will elevate us to an equality with themselves. We also know, that it is of more importance to us than gold,” she declared.23 Her sentiments echoed those of David Walker, an African American activist who accused many whites of being deathly afraid of black elevation. No matter the enemy, African Americans would battle for equality, rights, and inclusion, with education as their weapon.24
Three major tenets characterized African American women’s educational activism: eradicating prejudice and promoting Christian love, training African American women and men to be educator-activists who would fight for civil rights, and cultivating moral and intellectual character in children and youth. Instilling moral and intellectual character in children and youth meant abiding by a biblical version of morality that stressed care, kindness, and God’s love. This perspective shaped what children and youth studied in the classroom, whether it was English grammar, botany, geography, or French. It was thought that pursuing knowledge could dramatically augment the effectiveness of African American claims for freedom, civil rights, and human dignity. In other words, education was more than just a path to literacy; it was a force multiplier allowing African American men, women, and children to live their purpose.25
Examining African American women’s education makes it clear that racial and gender discrimination in public and private schools was not just local but hyperlocal. Local customs and rules determined how public, and sometimes private, schools were built, constituted, and maintained. Moreover local customs might actually be temporary. In Salem, Massachusetts, for example, the school committee initiated a policy of racial school discrimination in 1834, but at least one public grammar school did not enforce that policy, and African American students were schooled alongside white students. Salem was not an outlier, as other towns and cities, including Providence, Rhode Island, operated in like manner. Policies that shaped private and public schools in the Northeast were not fixed, and gradual changes to the composition of the student body could occur within the system of public education.
Public education was in its early stages of systematization at the turn of the century. Many towns and cities in the region had a common, or public, primary school, which offered a basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic; some grammar schools, which provided more advanced study; and occasionally a public high school, which some educational reformers referred to as “democracy’s college” for its egalitarian ethos and advanced curriculum.26 Educational divisions, however—like primary school and high school—did not exist in the same way as in today’s schools. Hence I examine private seminaries along with public high schools for three reasons: First, young African American women and their families did not confine their educational quest to one town but actually crisscrossed urban areas and rural communities to attend various types of schools. Second, only during the nineteenth century did the public high school gradually begin to overtake the private seminary as the preferred institution for advanced study.27 Third, this gradual shift coincided with a discursive turn among African American activists, wherein the fight for educational opportunity at private seminaries gave way to a demand for equal school rights at public high schools.
The stories that we can tell about African American women are definitely shaped by the archive. This book draws from a rich set of records that concern African American women’s experiences but are not always written by African American women themselves. Like other historians faced with the fragmented nature of the archive, I have carefully read into and interpreted archival silences and absences to provide a glimpse into the lives of African American women in the distant and not-so-distant past.28 I highlight sources such as diaries, letters, and essays produced by young African American women that offer insights into their learning, schooling, and teaching. Untapped archival and digital collections at repositories in Ohio, Connecticut, and Massachusetts and genealogical records document the family history of some of these women (appendix C).29 And I have mined other archival materials, such as school catalogues, annual reports from antislavery organizations, court records, and petitions to reconstruct broader debates about race, gender, and education and to make African American girls and women—and their desire to learn—visible and palpable.30
Building on Bettina Aptheker’s concept of “pivoting the center,” this study also considers the meaning of solidarity and alliance within the larger struggle for African American education in the early nineteenth century.31 To that end, I pull in the observations of African American and white male abolitionists who supported young women, including Theodore S. Wright, William Cooper Nell, and William Lloyd Garrison; white school founders such as Prudence Crandall and Hiram Huntington Kellogg; and white teachers at private female seminaries and public high schools such as Elizabeth Everett and William Dodge, among others. By accepting African American girls as students, by treating them as equals in the classroom, and by empowering them to raise their voices, these abolitionists,
