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4 “Reminiscences of School Life” Six College Memoirs Autobiography provides a rich source from which to consider the development of African American collegiate women. Though historically unreliable as a stand-alone document, a first-person account (as seen in John Hope Franklin’s Mirror to America), adds much detail to the scene drawn by the collective, quantitative story. The six autobiographical case studies presented in this chapter reveal themes in the conditions, emotions, motivations, and opposition that black women experienced in college classrooms, campuses, and communities.1 This range of college experiences, from Fanny Coppin’s in the midnineteenth century to Pauli Murray’s in the mid-twentieth century, represents admirable dedication to individual cultivation. Though additional narratives are added in the next chapter’s contextual essay, the central figures considered here are Fanny Jackson Coppin, Mary Church Terrell, Zora Neale Hurston, Lena Beatrice Morton, Rose Butler Browne, and Pauli Murray. Each offers a fascinating magnification of her understanding of the “right to grow.” Many black women who began college did not complete graduation requirements because of lack of funds, desire to work for civil rights, or frustration with racism and sexism in the hierarchy of the university, so these accounts are especially poignant because five of the six women progressed to graduate-level study. In an article titled “Collegiate Womanhood” in the Fisk Herald (1930), Marjorie Baltimore explained that the multiple barriers attendant in the “double bind of race and sex,” for black women, amounted to more than the sum of its parts. The case studies below demonstrate the exponential nature of the barriers that arose from this double bind. Yet the stories move beyond victimization by defining college as struggle, adventure, and success. The accounts are compelling for their detail and humanize the national demographic numbers. First, basic biographical details are presented, followed by each woman’s reflections on college life.2 78 Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954 Frances (Fanny) Jackson Coppin (1837–1913) Fanny Coppin was born enslaved in the nation’s capital to Lucy, also enslaved. It was rumored that Fanny’s father was a white “senator from Carolina.” Fanny ’s aunt Sarah purchased her freedom at the age of thirteen or fourteen for $125. Fanny attended school in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and then in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1860, Jackson began the “ladies’ course” at Oberlin, and the following year she began the more rigorous “gentlemen’s course.” She graduated from Oberlin in August 1865 and immediately began teaching at the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY) in Philadelphia. As a result of her excellence in teaching, Coppin was appointed by the Quaker Board of Managers to the position of principal, which she held from 1869 to 1902. In 1881, she married Levi Coppin, fifteen years her junior, and they were both involved in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. In 1902, the Coppins conducted missionary work in Cape Town, South Africa.3 Coppin was intimately involved with the community surrounding the ICY, especially in settlement homes for black women. She also wrote children’s texts and served on the board of the Home for the Aged and Infirmed Colored People from 1881 to 1913. She gained recognition through her weekly column, the “Women’s Department,” in the Christian Recorder, and articles in the Philadelphia Press and Boston Commonwealth. Her public addresses included a speech titled “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation,” given at the Congress of Representative Women at the Columbian Exposition (1893 Chicago World’s Fair).4 Coppin’s Reminiscences of a School Life and Hints on Teaching (1913) documented her administration and pedagogy at ICY and also included travel diaries and biographical narratives of students. In this collection, she revealed challenging aspects of her college years, but she also recalled fruitful relationships in Oberlin and Philadelphia.5 Reminiscences melded genres: it was at once autobiography, memoir, textbook, and organizational history . In 1903, a year after her retirement as principal, the school was moved to Cheyney, Pennsylvania, and renamed Cheyney State Teacher’s School. Through efforts of her former students, Coppin has been recognized as a champion of black teacher education and Coppin State College in Maryland was named in her honor.6 In 1859, only 32 of Oberlin’s 1,200 students were black, and by 1861, blacks comprised only 245 of 8,800 Oberlin’s cumulative population. In 1860, the year Coppin entered Oberlin, 199 of 1,311 students were...

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