Mary Jane Patterson

First African American Woman College Graduate

Mary Jane Patterson was the first African American woman to earn a bachelor's degree (Oberlin College, 1862). She became a successful teacher and was later appointed as the first black principal at America's first public high school for blacks (Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, Washington, DC, 1871). Patterson spent her career creating new educational opportunities for African Americans after the Civil War.

Childhood and Early Years
Mary Jane Patterson was born on September 12, 1840, in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of Henry Irving Patterson and Emmeline Taylor Patterson. Mary was probably the oldest of at least seven siblings. Her father, a boyhood friend of future U.S. President Andrew Johnson, was a bricklayer and plasterer. About 1852 he either obtained his freedom or escaped from slavery and moved his family out of North Carolina.

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Charlotte Ray

First African American Woman Lawyer

Not only was Charlotte Ray the first African American woman lawyer in the United States, she was one of the first women to practice in the District of Columbia and the third American woman of any race to earn a law degree (Howard University Law School, 1872).

Childhood and Early Years
Charlotte E. Ray was born in New York City on January 13, 1850 to Charlotte and Reverend Charles Bennett Ray. She had six siblings, including two sisters, Cordelia and Florence. Reverend Ray was an important figure in the abolitionist movement and edited a paper called The Colored American. Education was important to the Rays, and all of their girls went to college.

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Charlotte began attending the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth in Washington, DC, one of the few schools that offered a quality education to young African American women. The Institution was founded by Myrtilla Miner after the school in Mississippi where she taught refused her permission to conduct classes for African American girls.

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Mary Ellen Pleasant

Humanitarian and Businesswoman

Pleasant was a civil rights activist and entrepreneur who used her fortune to further the abolitionist movement. She worked on the Underground Railroad in several states, including California during the Gold Rush and won significant civil rights in the courts, earning the name 'Mother of Civil Rights in California.'

Childhood and Early Years
Mary Ellen Pleasant altered and embellished her story in several memoirs to offset the criticisms levied against her toward the end of her life, making it difficult to separate fact from fiction. By her own account she was born Mary Ellen Williams on August 19, 1814, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to an African American mother and Louis Alexander Williams, a well educated merchant from the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii).

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Harriet Wilson

First African American Woman Novelist in the U.S.

Harriet Wilson is considered the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent as well as the author of the first novel by an African American woman in the U.S. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known. It was re-discovered in 1982 by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., which led to the publication of a facsimile edition in 1983.

Image: Harriet Wilson Memorial Statue
Bicentennial Park, Milford, New Hampshire

Childhood and Early Years
Born a mixed race free person of color in Milford, New Hampshire on March 15, 1825, Harriet Adams was the daughter of Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry, and Joshua Green, an African American "hooper of barrels." After Green died when the girl was young, her mother abandoned Harriet at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a wealthy Milford farmer.

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Annie Burton

From Slave to Businesswoman in the Civil War Era

Annie Louise Burton was born a slave in Clayton, Alabama in 1858. She was the daughter of a woman named Nancy, the cook of Mr. and Mrs. William Farrin whose plantation was near Clayton. Annie's father, a white man born in Liverpool, England, owned a plantation that was a long walk from the Farrin plantation. Annie grew up during the Civil War and remembered fondly her early days on the plantation.

Excerpt, Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days:

On the plantation there were ten white children and fourteen colored children. Our days were spent roaming about from plantation to plantation, not knowing or caring what things were going on in the great world outside our little realm. Planting time and harvest time were happy days for us. How often at the harvest time the planters discovered cornstalks missing from the ends of the rows, and blamed the crows! We were called the "little fairy devils." To the sweet potatoes and peanuts and sugar cane we also helped ourselves.

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Anna Brown

Wife of African American Author William Wells Brown

On April 12, 1860 twenty-five year old Anna Elizabeth Gray married William Wells Brown - author of Clotel, the first novel written by an African American in the United States. Anna later published Brown's works under the imprint A.G. Brown. They had one daughter, Clotelle, in 1862.

William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was a prominent African American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright and historian. After spending the first 25 years of his life in slavery and most of a decade on the run as a fugitive, Brown came into prominence in the abolitionist movement. He wrote his autobiography, several volumes of black history and Clotel, the first novel written by an African American. Although he published more than a dozen books and pamphlets, Brown has been generally ignored in American history.

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Edmonia Highgate

Teacher of Freed Slaves

Teaching in the South during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) took great courage. The women who traveled there to teach often feared for their lives but were determined to empower the freed slaves through literacy.

Image: The Misses Cooke's school room, Freedman's Bureau, Richmond, Va. In Frank Leslie's illustrated Newspaper, 1866 Nov. 17, Library of Congress

Edmonia Highgate, the daughter of freed slaves, was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1844. She graduated from high school with honors, taught for a year in Montrose, Pennsylvania, and then became principal of a black school in Binghamton, New York. She was one of the many upstate New Yorkers who responded to the appeal to aid those who had survived slavery.

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Harriet Tubman

Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Painting by Paul Collins:
Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad

Harriet Tubman was an African American abolitionist, humanitarian and Union spy during the Civil War. After escaping from slavery, she made thirteen missions back to the land of her servitude to rescue scores of slaves, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

She was born Araminta Ross around 1820 the fifth of nine children born to slave parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Benjamin Ross, in Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. As with many slaves in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of her birth was recorded, and historians differ as to the best estimate. Harriet herself reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone says 1820.

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Amanda Dickson

Wealthy African American Woman

Amanda America Dickson, the daughter of a slave and her white owner, became one of the wealthiest black women in nineteenth-century America. She was born on November 20, 1849, on the plantation of her father, the famous white agricultural reformer David Dickson in Hancock County, Georgia. Amanda's birth was the product of Dickson's rape of his twelve-year-old slave, Julia Frances Lewis Dickson. At the time, he was forty and the most prosperous planter in the county.

According to the Dickson family oral history, David Dickson doted on his mixed-race daughter, and Julia quite openly became his concubine and housekeeper. Though she remained legally enslaved until 1864, Amanda received a lady's upbringing, including beautiful dresses, lessons on good manners, cultivated speech, and playing the piano. Everyone on the Dickson plantation called her 'Miss Mandy.'

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African Americans of Gettysburg

Blacks in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Margaret Palm was a colorful character in Gettysburg's African American community during the mid-nineteenth century. She served as a conductor along the local branch of the Underground Railroad, earning the nickname Maggie Bluecoat for the blue circa-1812 military coat she wore while conducting fugitive slaves north. One evening, she was accosted by two strangers who bound her hands and tried to kidnap her into Maryland and slavery. Her screams attracted help and she escaped her assailants.

Alexander Dobbin, a Presbyterian minister, arrived in the Marsh Creek valley and purchased a two-hundred-acre plot of land in the spring of 1774. Two years later, Dobbin established the beginnings of local black community when he returned with two slaves who built the stone building that would serve as Dobbin's home and school. These slaves were the first known African Americans in Cumberland Township.

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Sarah Mapps Douglass

African American Abolitionist and Teacher

Sarah Mapps Douglass was born in Philadelphia on September 9, 1806, the daughter of renowned abolitionists Robert Douglass, Sr. and Grace Bustill Douglass. Like many prosperous families, the Douglasses educated Sarah and her brother Robert at home with private tutors.

Image: Sarah Mapps Douglass: Faithful Attender of Quaker Meeting: View from the Back Bench by Margaret Hope Bacon

Sarah's grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, was a member of the Free African Society, the first African American charity organization. In 1803, he established a school for black children in his home.

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Rebecca Lee Crumpler

First African American Woman Doctor

Rebecca Lee was born in Delaware in 1833. An aunt in Pennsylvania, who spent much of her time caring for sick neighbors, raised her. Due to her aunt's influence, Rebecca developed a strong compassion for the sick at a very young age, and learned to care for ill patients. The first formal school for nursing did not open until 1873, so she performed her work without any formal training.

By 1852, she moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts, where she worked as a nurse for the next eight years. Her dedication gained her notice from the doctors she served under, and with their recommendations, she entered the New England Female Medical College in Boston in 1860.

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Harriet Jacobs

African American Abolitionist and Author

Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs' single work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual harassment and abuse they endured.

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Daniel was a mulatto slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Delilah was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet inherited the status of slave from her mother—if the mother was a slave, the child was a slave. That was the law.

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Margaret Garner

Runaway Slave from Kentucky

Margaret Garner was a fugitive slave who became widely known when she and her family made a brave escape to freedom in the years before the Civil War. Garner killed her own daughter rather than allow the child to be returned to slavery. Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize winning novel Beloved (1988) is based on this story.

Image: The Modern Medea
By Thomas Satterwhite Noble

Margaret Garner, an enslaved African American woman in pre-Civil War America, was born on June 4, 1834, at Maplewood plantation in Boone County, Kentucky, where her parents were also slaves. When she was old enough, Margaret became a household domestic, waiting on the family and performing household chores.

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Julia Foote

Female Preacher in the Civil War Era

Julia A. J. Foote's autobiography, A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879), is representative of a large number of similar texts published by women who believed that Christianity had made them the spiritual equals of men and hence equally authorized to lead the church. Although her autobiography attacks racism and other social abuses, it is the subordination of women and her desire to inspire faith in her Christian sisters that endow her story with its distinctive voice and intensity.

Foote's belief in the gender equality of the Christian spirit and her refusal to defer to husband or minister when her own intuitive sense of personal authority was at stake mark Foote's autobiographical work as an important early expression of the American feminist literary tradition.

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Lydia Hamilton Smith

Abolitionist and African American Businesswoman

S. Epatha Merkerson plays Lydia Hamilton Smith in the film, Lincoln (2012), alongside Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Merkerson owes much of her fame to her role as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the original Law and Order television series.

Lydia Hamilton Smith had a special relationship with U.S. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. She became Stevens' housekeeper in 1847, and for 25 years she managed his homes and businesses. Through their partnership she gained the skills and social contacts necessary to become a successful businesswoman after his death.

Lydia Hamilton was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1815, to an African mother and Irish father. She married a free black man named Jacob Smith and bore two sons but they separated before he died in 1852 and she raised the children alone.

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Susie King Taylor

African American Civil War Nurse and Teacher

Susie Baker began life as a slave on August 6, 1848, at the Grest Plantation in Liberty County, Georgia, 35 miles south of Savannah. She was the first of nine children of Hagar Ann Reed and Raymond Baker. Her mother was a domestic servant for the Grest family.

The Grests treated Susie and her brother with great affection, their childless mistress even allowing them to sleep on her bed when her husband was away on business. This easy-going atmosphere, Susie's first experience of mutual trust between black people and white, became part of the standard by which she judged all later relationships with white people.

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Charlotte Forten

Women in Education: Teacher of Emancipated Slaves

Charlotte Forten was the first northern African American schoolteacher to go south to teach former slaves. As a black woman, she hoped to find kinship with the freedmen, but her own education set her apart from the former slaves. For two years she stayed on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, but ill health forced her to return north. In 1864, she published "Life on the Sea Islands" in The Atlantic Monthly, which brought the work of the Port Royal Experiment to the attention of northern readers.

Childhood
Charlotte Forten was born in Philadelphia in 1837 into an influential and affluent family, all of whom were active in promoting equal rights for African Americans. They moved in the same circles as William Lloyd Garrison and John Greenleaf Whittier. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was raised by her grandmother. An only child, Charlotte lead a protected life, was not allowed to attend Philadelphia's segregated schools, but was taught by private tutors at home.

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Author, Feminist and Social Reformer

Frances Ellen Watkins was born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland in 1825. She was not yet three years old when her mother died, and she was raised by her uncle, Reverend William Watkins, a teacher and radical advocate for civil rights who founded the William Watkins Academy for free African American children for Negro Youth ( where Frances was educated). The education she received there, and her uncle's civil rights activism greatly influenced her writing.

Frances attended her uncle's school until she was thirteen years old, when she was sent out to earn a living. She found work as a babysitter and seamstress for the Armstrong family. Mr. Armstrong owned a bookstore, and he allowed Frances free access to books and encouraged her in her love for writing. Around 1846, Frances published her first collection of poetry, Forest Leaves. The book was extremely popular and over the next few years went through 20 editions.

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Hallie Quinn Brown

Feminist, Author and Social Reformer

Hallie Quinn Brown was an abolitionist, educator, writer and women's rights activist in the Civil War era. She was born March 10, 1845 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to former slaves, Thomas and Frances Scroggins Brown. Both were well-educated and actively involved with the Underground Railroad.

In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Hallie moved with her parents and five siblings to Chatham, Ontario, where her father earned his living as a farmer, and the children attended the local school.

In 1870, the family settled in Wilberforce, Ohio, so Hallie and her younger brother could attend Wilberforce College, a primarily black institution. Hallie graduated in 1873 with a Bachelor of Science degree.

After graduation, Brown began teaching in Mississippi on the Senora Plantation, to help educate southern blacks during Reconstruction. She taught at plantation schools and public schools in Mississippi and South Carolina for 12 years. From 1885 to 1887, Hallie served as a dean at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina.

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