An Education in Black Women's Activism

Education has been a civil rights battleground since before the Civil War. From the failure of the New Haven "African College" in 1831 to mob attacks on the Canterbury Female Seminary in 1833 and the Noyes Academy in 1835 to the Roberts desegregation case in 1849, contests over access to schooling and higher learning helped define the northern Black freedom struggle. After abolition itself, the right to education was a chief priority for African American reformers. For many Black leaders, the issue was personal. Encountering racial discrimination as students helped make lifelong activists out of some preeminent abolitionists, including William Howard Day, Henry Highland Garnet, and William Cooper Nell. But if exclusion or expulsion from school is where narratives of Black men's activism begin, it is often where narratives of Black women's activism end. Alexander Crummell is rejected from General Theological Seminary and becomes an exponent of racial self-determination. Rosetta Douglass is ousted from Seward Seminary and becomes a side note in her famous father's biographies.

Kabria Baumgartner's In Pursuit of Knowledge gives women like Rosetta Douglass their due. Her monograph, the first book-length treatment of its subject, shows how personal struggles for education inspired and empowered antebellum Black women to demand "equal school rights" for their communities. Prior historians of race, gender, and education in this period have concentrated mainly on African American alumnae of Oberlin College who hailed primarily from the West and South. Baumgartner shifts the focus to student and teacher activists in the Northeast. Some of the characters in this book—Sarah Mapps Douglass, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Parker Remond—will be familiar to historians of Black abolitionism. Others like Ursula James, Rosetta Morrison, and Eunice Ross likely will not. Together, these women's school experiences and subsequent teaching careers form the connective tissue of Baumgartner's narrative, which she divides into two parts. The first half examines private female seminaries, while the second analyzes public schools, specifically in Massachusetts. The author's fastidious research yields a wealth of new information about the Black student experience in each of these settings. Baumgartner uses these findings to demonstrate the crucial role Black women played in making education integral to the fight for civil rights. Collectively, they deployed their own brand of social protest, an "ethic of Christian love," which set them apart from vicious adversaries and steeled them against retribution (p. 16).

While its contributions are singular, In Pursuit of Knowledge is indebted to pathbreaking works of historians like Jane Dabel, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, and Martha S. Jones, whose influence Baumgartner acknowledges. Starting in the late 1990s, these and other scholars began re-envisioning the history of Black protest in the antebellum North by placing African American women at its center. Their research recovered female participation in political entities more often associated with Black men, such as fraternal orders, vigilance committees, and Colored Conventions. But their histories also recognized the myriad other institutions of civil society through which African American women shaped public culture, from church auxiliaries and schools to lyceums and literary associations, mutual aid circles, war relief agencies, and antislavery societies. Confronting intersecting forms of racial and gender prejudice, Black women displayed their respectability through these private organizations and then used that authority to agitate publicly for racial equality and women's rights. Not all of their advocacy was discursive, however. Carol Lasser describes how African American women at Oberlin College "shaped their lives themselves as texts" and "performed the abolition for which others argued" through their daily pursuits of education, piety, and refinement.¹ Likewise, Erica Ball highlights Black women's (and men's) efforts "to live an antislavery life" by approaching every aspect of their private lives in light of the freedom struggle.²

Collectively, these scholars not only reoriented a historiography that had privileged men's activism, they also revised the definition of "activism" itself to account for the unique situation of African...