William G. Allen: The Forgotten Professor

WILLIAM G. ALLEN: THE FORGOTTEN PROFESSOR R. J. M. Blackett The history of Afro-Americans is littered with a depressingnumber of important but forgetten individuals, men and women who resisted oppression and fought for a new world free from racial inequalities. One of these was William G. Allen, the "Colored Professor." Allen was the first black American employed as a professor at a white college—the New York Central College at McGrawville. The few references to Allen in the histories of ante-bellum black America are usually confined to his appointment at McGrawville, and the national notoriety he gained when it was made public that he intended to marry one of his white students. For their brashviolation of America's social and racialmores, theyoung couple were compelled to flee the country for England. This paper attempts to restore Allen to his rightful place among his contemporaries. Born of a free mulatto mother and white father in the village of Urbana, Virginia about 1820, Allen spent his youth in Norfolk. When his parents died, he was adopted by a relatively well-to-do free black family and moved to Fortress Monroe. Before his adoption the young Allen had attended a school for black children in Norfolk for almost two years until the school was forced to close following Nat Turner's rebellion. In Monroe no schools werewilling to takeAllen because ofhis color, but some of the Federal troops stationed there, many of whom were "educated foreigners," taught him the rudiments of German and French. Through his personal drive and "one kind-hearted slave holder, an army officer," Allen gained access to valuable libraries where he spend many hours. The experience of these restrictions, and die cruel workings of slavery, made Allen particularly aware of the needs of die oppressed. The young man committed himself to fight for emancipation and the elimination of prejudice, for, as he later wrote, liberty was "the first condition of human progress, and the especial handmaiden of all diat in human life is beautiful and true."1° Research for this article was made possible by grants from the Research Development Fund of the University of Pittsburgh and the Department of Black Studies. I wish to thank Professors Betty Fladeland and Robert Harris for their useful comments. 1 William G. Allen, A Short Personal Narrative (Dublin, 1860), 5-8. Civil War History, Vol. XXVI, No. 1 Copyright © 1980 by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/80/2601-0003 $00.70/0 40CIVIL WAR HISTORY In 1838 the Reverend William Hall of New York opened a school in Monroe which Allen attended. Hall was so impressed by the young man that he wrote Gerrit Smith, the New York abolitionist and philanthropist, suggesting that he sponsor Allen's education at a school in New York.2 Soon after Allen enrolled at Oneida Institute in Whitesboro . Oneida, headed by Beriah Green, was not only a stimulating intellectual environment in which blacks fully participated, it was a hotbed of abolitionist activity. Green, Smith, and probably the school's most famous black alumni, Henry Highland Garnet, Samuel Ringgold Ward and J.W. Loguen, provided much of the intellectual leadership among abolitionists in upstate New York. They were Liberty party men who undoubtedly had a profound influence on the new scholar. Allen participated in die party's activities and later attended meetings of the Negro Convention Movement as a member of the Troy delegation.3 In die summer of 1841 Allen took a temporary teaching job at one of the many schools organized by Hiram Wilson for fugitive slaves in Canada. Wilson had taken up his Canadian mission in 1837 and by 1840 diere were many schools catering to the needs of some of the estimated 12,000 fugitives in Canada. The following year Gerrit Smith and others organized a committee in Rochester to channel money, Bibles and clothing to the schools begun or inspired by Wilson's efforts.4 It is quite likely that Allen was involved in this activity and that Smith in part influenced his decision to go to Canada. After graduating from Oneida in 1843 "with some honor," Allen moved to Troy where he taught school and co-edited...