American women’s schooling and learning.
In Pursuit of Knowledge unfolds in two overlapping parts, each comprising three chapters. Part I traces educational opportunity at private female seminaries. Chapter 1 follows the young African American women at the Canterbury Female Seminary. Nineteen-year-old Sarah Harris and others were met with hostility from white residents but responded by adopting and practicing an ethic of Christian love, a distinct form of social protest. Sarah and her peers named prejudice and other forms of wrongdoing anti-Christian, while also advocating for peaceful and loving communities inclusive of African Americans.32 Chapter 2 opens with fifteen-year-old Mary E. Miles fleeing the Canterbury Female Seminary and arriving at the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York. Founded in 1833 by Hiram Huntington Kellogg, a white Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, this seminary linked academic study in physics and botany with manual labor such as washing and cooking. Unlike the Canterbury Female Seminary, Kellogg’s seminary thrived as African American and white women students lived, worked, studied, and prayed together. These young women learned that prosocial behavior actually informed social reform initiatives. Chapter 3 offers a glimpse into the life of Rosetta Morrison, who attended the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary before embarking upon a short-lived teaching career in New York City. Rosetta benefited from an emerging local network of African American women teacher-activists who worked alongside African American men. Teaching and mothering not only constituted service to the race but also offered one way to lead a purposeful life. Telling Rosetta’s story enlarges the archive on African American women’s educational activism in New York City.
Part II explores the pursuit of educational justice in Massachusetts public schools. Though some African American families in the Northeast availed themselves of private schools, these institutions were capricious and undependable. Hence African American families took advantage of the expansion of public school systems in the Northeast, especially in Massachusetts, a leader in antebellum educational movements. Chapter 4 recognizes young African American women who turned Massachusetts public high schools into a battleground for equal school rights. Sarah Parker Remond and Eunice Ross were denied access to the public high schools in Salem and Nantucket, respectively, despite their strong qualifications. They both worked with allies to launch a campaign to end racial exclusion in public schools.33 Chapter 5 chronicles the twenty-year struggle for equal school rights in the city of Boston. African American activists and their allies engaged in a range of protest strategies, from boycotts to lawsuits, in order to abolish racially exclusive public schools. In the process, the African American girl became an icon for educational justice. Chapter 6 examines the pedagogy of African American women teachers in Boston and Philadelphia, such as Susan Paul, Sarah Mapps Douglass, and Charlotte Forten. Analyzing didactic fiction alongside newspaper advertisements and antislavery correspondence, the chapter imagines the antebellum classroom with an African American woman teacher. Faith, activism, and commitment to character education united these teachers and their practices.
To overlook African American girls and women as educational activists in early America is to ignore their insights and perspectives, especially concerning race and gender. Fully aware that education was far from a panacea, African American women insisted nonetheless on its centrality for black achievement, opportunity, and civil rights. They, along with their allies, wished to blaze a path for themselves and the next generation.34 Chronicling their struggles, In Pursuit of Knowledge addresses an essential human question: What does it mean to live a purposeful life? To seek learning and to grow, some African American women might respond. But would they be welcomed into the classroom, or would they be debarred? Would they be harassed by adversaries, or could they learn in peace? These purposeful young women never knew what awaited them. But they went forward anyway.
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.
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