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, school founders, and teachers powerfully contributed to African 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